A good composer does not imitate; he steals |
A plague on eminence! I hardly dare cross the street anymore without a convoy, and I am stared at wherever I go like an idiot member of a royal family or an animal in a zoo; and zoo animals have been known to die from stares |
Conductors' careers are made for the most part with 'Romantic' music. 'Classic' music eliminates the conductor; we do not remember him in it. |
Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano playing in my living room has to the book I am reading |
Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 percent playing out of tune. |
I am an inventor of music. |
I am in the present. I cannot know what tomorrow will bring forth. I can know only what the truth is for me today. That is what I am called upon to serve, and I serve it in all lucidity. |
I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge. |
I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I've felt it |
I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the variety of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust |
I remember being handed a score composed by Mozart at the age of eleven. What could I say? I felt like de Kooning, who was asked to comment on a certain abstract painting, and answered in the negative. He was then told it was the work of a celebrated monk |
I was born out of due time in the sense that by temperament and talent I should have been more suited for the life of a small Bach, living in anonymity and composing regularly for an established service and for God |
In order to create there must be a dynamic force, and what force is more potent than love? |
Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being? |
It's one of nature's ways that we often feel closer to distant generations than to the generation immediately preceding us. |