The main thing is to be satisfied with your work yourself. It’s useless to have an audience happy if you are not happy.
AARON COPLANDThe main thing is to be satisfied with your work yourself. It’s useless to have an audience happy if you are not happy.
AARON COPLANDI hope my recordings of my own works won’t inhibit other people’s performances. The brutal fact is that one doesn’t always get the exact tempo one wants, although one improves with experience.
AARON COPLANDSomeone once asked me… whether I waited for inspiration. My answer was: “Every day!”
AARON COPLANDYou compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.
AARON COPLANDMozart tapped the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breathtaking rightness.
AARON COPLANDSo long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning.
AARON COPLANDThe melody is generally what the piece is all about.
AARON COPLANDA melody is not merely something you can hum.
AARON COPLANDArthur V. Berger commenting on the music of Aaron Copland: Here is at last an American that we may place unapologetically beside the great recognized creative figures of any other country.
AARON COPLANDI don’t compose. I assemble materials.
AARON COPLANDListening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes.
AARON COPLANDIf you want to know about the Sixties, play the music of The Beatles.
AARON COPLANDThe whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking “Is there a meaning to music?” My answer would be, “Yes”, And “Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?” My answer to that would be “No.”
AARON COPLANDYou may feel depressed, but it can’t be so depressing that you can’t move. No, I would say that people create in moments when they are elated about expressing their depression!
AARON COPLANDComposers tend to assume that everyone loves music. Surprisingly enough, everyone doesn’t.
AARON COPLANDIf one were asked to name one musician who came closest to composing without human flaw, I suppose general consensus would choose Johann Sebastian Bach.
AARON COPLAND