Shh. Listen to the sounds that surround you. Notice the pitches, the volume, the timbre, the many lines of counterpoint. As light taught Monet to paint, the earth may be teaching you music.
Pete Seeger
Monet’s cliffs will survive as a prodigious series, as will a hundred others of his canvases.. ..He’ll be in the Louvre, for sure, alongside Constable and Turner. Damn it, he’s even greater. He painted the iridescence of the earth. He’s painted water. Remember those Rouen cathedrals (Monet painted, fh).. ..But where everything slips away in these pictures of Monet's, nowadays we must insert a solidity, a framework..
Paul Cezanne
It's not what you've been taught - in the conservative sectors - that you have a poverty of materials. You're all healthy, you're all strong enough to make sounds until the end of time. The only problem you have is deciding whether your sound is any good. What I'm encouraging you to do is not to think about that too much, not to reevaluate the sounds, but just to examine them, and see what the structure is. See what's actually there, before you start this process of trying to ask yourself whether Nancy Reagan would like it, or Mrs. Bush. Just take the whole big first chunk, and then break it down. Follow what you know about it to where it goes... The music's there. I'm not trying to be weird, but it's there. I was taught that I didn't have anything, and it was my job to work hard and get something, and that's just not true.
Robert Ashley
When people listen to my music, I hope that they will notice that if you take a piece by a composer like Schubert, the major and the minor triad is an extermely important thing not merely as harmony, but in creating melodic lines. Schubert is always walking up and down with arpeggios on C, E, G and so forth. I am not doing anything different really, except using a different system of harmony.
Elliott Carter
"Somebody will ask those of us who compose with the aid of computers: 'So you make all these decisions for the computer or the electronic medium but wouldn't you like to have a performer who makes certain other decisions?' Many composers don't mind collaborating with the performer with regards to decisions of tempo, or rhythm, or dynamics, or timbre, but ask them if they would allow the performer to make decisions with regard to pitch and the answer will be 'Pitches you don't change.' Some of us feel the same way in regard to the other musical aspects that are traditionally considered secondary, but which we consider fundamental. As for the future of electronic music, it seems quite obvious to me that its unique resources guarantee its use, because it has shifted the boundaries of music away from the limitations of the acoustical instrument, of the performer's coordinating capabilities, to the almost infinite limitations of the electronic instrument. The new limitations are the human ones of perception." Quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812.
Milton Babbitt
Today we live in a chaos of straight lines, in a jungle of straight lines. If you do not believe this, take the trouble to count the straight lines which surround you. Then you will understand, for you will never finish counting.
Friedensreich Hundertwasser
Seeger, Pete
Seelye, Julius Hawley
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