Someone once asked me… whether I waited for inspiration. My answer was: “Every day!”
AARON COPLAND
When I speak of the gifted listener, I am thinking of the nonmusician primarily, of the listener who intends to retain his amateur status. It is the thought of just such a listener that excites the composer in me.
More Aaron Copland Quotes
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Someone once asked me… whether I waited for inspiration. My answer was: “Every day!”
AARON COPLAND -
Mozart tapped the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breathtaking rightness.
AARON COPLAND -
I adore extravagance but I abhor waste.
AARON COPLAND -
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You 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 COPLAND -
Arthur 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 COPLAND -
When I speak of the gifted listener, I am thinking of the nonmusician primarily, of the listener who intends to retain his amateur status. It is the thought of just such a listener that excites the composer in me.
AARON COPLAND -
If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.
AARON COPLAND -
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Music that is born complex is not inherently better or worse than music that is born simple.
AARON COPLAND -
If you want to know about the Sixties, play the music of The Beatles.
AARON COPLAND -
Most people use music as a couch; they want to be pillowed on it, relaxed and consoled for the stress of daily living. But serious music was never meant to be soporific.
AARON COPLAND -
If 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 -
I 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 COPLAND -
So 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 COPLAND -
I don’t compose. I assemble materials.
AARON COPLAND