Quotes On Music
From Music and Imagination (1952):
… I hold that person fortunate who has the gift, for there are few pleasures in art greater than the secure sense that one can recognize beauty when one comes upon it. (p. 8)
… once out of my hands the work takes on a life of its own. In a similar way I can imagine a father who takes no personal credit for the beauty of a much admired daughter. This must mean that the artist (or father) considers himself an unwitting instrument whose satisfaction is not to produce beauty, but simply to produce. (p. 11)
A healthy musical curiosity and a broad musical experience sharpens the critical faculty of even the most talented amateur. (p. 19)
It is axiomatic that unless the hearing of the music first stirs the executant it is unlikely to move an audience. (p. 52)
He [Serge Koussevitsky] said our audiences would never fully understand American orchestral compositions until they heard them conducted by American-born conductors. It seems clear, then, that if we can speak of national traits of character, inevitably those traits will form the interpreter’s character as a human being and shine through the interpretation. (p. 56)
… each separate composition is a law onto itself and only bears a general resemblance to the external shape of whatever form is adopted. (p. 63)
Every artist, whatever his convictions, must sooner or later face the problem of communication with an audience. (pp.75-6)
I believe in the ultimate good of the world and of life as I live it in order to create a work of art. Negative emotions cannot produce art; positive emotions bespeak an emotion about something. I cannot imagine an art work without implied convictions; and that is true also for music, the most abstract of the arts. (p. 111)
From an interview in Keyboard Magazine, Winter 1985
…if you want to change the behavior, you have to change the structure.
In the old method of composing, you specify the result you want, and then you present a number of exact instructions to get there. The [Cornelius] Cardew piece [“Paragraph 7” from The Great Learning: a score with no notations, only a few instructions] is radical because he doesn’t do all that, and yet it happens. The behavior remains governed. Political systems are all doing what the old composers were doing. y a system of laws and constrainments, they attempt to specify behavior… They’re trying to govern a highly complex system by rote. And you don’t need to do that. Instead of trying to specify what you want in full detail, you only specify somewhat; then you ride on the dynamics of the system in the direction you want to go. There are certain organic regulators; you don’t have to come up with them, you just have to let them operate. (p.9)
The fabric of existence weaves itself whole. You cannot set an art off in the corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance.
Rimsky-Korsakov used to say that he refused to acknowledge any complaints from composers about their hard lot in life. He explained his position thus: Talk to a bookkeeper and he’ll start complaining about life and his kwork. Work has ruined him, it’s so dull and boring. You see, the bookeeper had planned to be a writer but life made him a bookkeeper. Rimsky-Korsakov said that it was rather different with composers. None of them can say that he had planned to be a bookkeeper and that life forced him to become a composer.
For some reason, people think that music must tell us only about the pinnacles of the human spirit, or at least about highly romantic villains. But there are very few heroes or villains. Most people are average, neither black nor white. They’re gray. A dirty shade of gray.
Art destroys silence.
When a man is in despair, it means that he still believes in something.
I write music, it’s performed. After all, my music says it all. It doesn’t need historical and hysterical commentaries. In the long run, any words about music are less important than the music.
What you have in your head, put it down on paper. The head is a fragile vessel.
Music is the sound of the circulation in nature’s veins. It is the flux which melds nature… the healthy ear always hears it, nearer or more remote.
Heard at a great distance thus tends to produce the same music, vibrating the strings of the universal lyre. There comes to me a melody which the air has strained, which has conversed with every leaf and needle of the woods.
Bitter sorrows will grow milder with music.
For myself, I have always considered that in general it is more satisfactory to proceed by similarity rather than by contrast. Music thus gains strengths in the measure that it does not succumb to the seductions of variety. What it loses in questionable riches it gains in true solidarity.
from Poetics of Music:
… tonal elements become music by virtue of their being organized, and that such organization presupposes a conscious human act.
Since I myself was created I cannot help having the desire to create.
Tradition is entirely different from habit, even from an excellent habit, since habit is by definition an unconscious acquisition and tends to become mechanical, whereas tradition results from a conscious and deliberate acceptance. A real tradition is not the relic of a past that is irretrievably gone; it is a living force that animates and informs the present.
Far from implying the repetition of what has been, tradition presupposes the reality of what endures. It appears as an heirloom, a heritage that one receives on condition of making it bear fruit before passing it on to one’s descendants.
From Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons (1942):
Contrast is everywhere. One has only to take note of it. Similarity is hidden, it must be sought out… (p. 32)
… there ought to be acknowledgement of the elementary fact that musical languages have to be transmitted, and a utopian vision of a common language that will allow music and musicians to speak… Without this covertly implied and perhaps unrealizable ideal, music cannot move, loses one of its direct reasons for existing and drifts from one mannerism to the next. It’s useful to search for things we can’t find.
Most composers are dead anyway.
Either the conductor gets the point from the score alone and what the composer tells him is superfluous, or the conductor will never get the point so what the composer tells him is also superfluous.
(owner of Sun Records and audio pioneer)
I can end wars with sound.
What good is music? None, Gage thought, and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and leaders, music says, ‘You are irrelevant’; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, ‘Listen.’ For being saved is not the point. Merciful, uncaring, it denies and breaks down all the shelters, the houses that men build for themselves, that they may see the sky.
from “An Die Musik”
(special thanks to Mark Hill for giving me this quote in 1990)