If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.
AARON COPLANDComposers tend to assume that everyone loves music. Surprisingly enough, everyone doesn’t.
More Aaron Copland Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The main thing is to be satisfied with your work yourself. It’s useless to have an audience happy if you are not happy.
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Mozart tapped the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breathtaking rightness.
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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.
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Inspiration may be a form of superconsciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness – I wouldn’t know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.
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I don’t compose. I assemble materials.
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Composers tend to assume that everyone loves music. Surprisingly enough, everyone doesn’t.
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You 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!
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The melody is generally what the piece is all about.
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Music that is born complex is not inherently better or worse than music that is born simple.
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I adore extravagance but I abhor waste.
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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.
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To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.
AARON COPLAND