If you want to know about the Sixties, play the music of The Beatles.
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.
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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Mozart tapped the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breathtaking rightness.
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The melody is generally what the piece is all about.
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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.
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The greatest moments of the human spirit may be deduced from the greatest moments in music.
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To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.
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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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I don’t compose. I assemble materials.
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Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes.
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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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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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Composers tend to assume that everyone loves music. Surprisingly enough, everyone doesn’t.
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If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.
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Music that is born complex is not inherently better or worse than music that is born simple.
AARON COPLAND