“It may well be that some composers do not believe in God. All of them, however, believe in Bach.”

Competitions are for horses, not artists.

I must admit, however, that there was a time when I thought I was approaching a species of twelve-tone music. Yet even in works of that period the absolute tonal foundation is unmistakable.

I cannot conceive of music that expresses absolutely nothing.

I cannot conceive of music that expresses absolutely nothing.

Our peasant music, naturally, is invariably tonal, if not always in the sense that the inflexible major and minor system is tonal. (An “atonal” folk-music, in my opinion, is unthinkable.)

His pagan barbarity, his explosive and angrily defiant melancholy, his demoniacal instinct . . . these are all echoes . . . of the thousand-year-old Hungarian psyche.

Folk melodies are the embodiment of an artistic perfection of the highest order; in fact, they are models of the way in which a musical idea can be expressed with utmost perfection in terms of brevity of form and simplicity of means.

With maturity comes the wish to economize – to be more simple. Maturity is the period when one finds the just measure.

Since we depend upon a tonal basis of this kind in our creative work, it is quite self-evident that our works are quite pronouncedly tonal in type.

In art there are only fast or slow developments. Essentially it is a matter of evolution, not revolution.

Some is subtle, wry-mouthed, or back-handed. It is by turns bitter, agonized, and grotesque. Even in the hands of white composers it involuntarily reflects the half-forgotten suffering of the negro.

As a composer I might class myself as a Neo-Romantic, inasmuch as I have always regarded music as a highly personal and emotional form of expression.

The model of a composer.

I am convinced that it is my own fault. Verdi is one of those composers.

For my qualifying concert, Helmut Walcha would not coach Charles-Marie Widor or any American compositions. In his defense, his forte was Germanic composers, and his forte was really a fortissimo!

I have written six symphonies, they are smaller-scale works. I seem to emit my themes, work them out, combine and intertwine them, and then come to a close. I usually feel that there are no superfluous extras, but probably most composers feel that way about their works.

The challenge to the composer is to get spontaneity into his permanence.

Men have been in the forefront of music for centuries, and they have written glorious music, loved and appreciated by many. In some ways, men are still in the forefront. There is a lot of room for composers of all types of music by both men and women, nowadays.