The tragedy of music is that it begins with perfection.
Music can imply the infinite if enough things depart from the norm far enough. Strange “abnormal” events can lead to the feeling that anything can happen, and you have a music with no boundaries.
The most interesting aspect for me, composing exclusively with patterns, is that there is not one organizational procedure more advantageous than another, perhaps because no one pattern ever takes precedence over the others.
For years I said if I could only find a comfortable chair I would rival Mozart.
To understand what music has to be, you have to live for music. Who’s ready to do that?
Most music is metaphor, but Wolff is not. I am not metaphor either. Parable, maybe. Cage is sermon.
Compositionally I always wanted to be like Fred Astaire.
The composer makes plans, music laughs.
What was great about the 50s is that for one brief moment – maybe, say, six weeks – nobody understood art.
No one has the Houdini school of composition.
For me it’s the instrument. If I want to think of a flute and the state of the arts I hear a vibrato; I don’t know what a flute is unless the person plays it for me.
I never feel that my music is sparse or minimalist; the way fat people never really think they’re fat. I certainly don’t consider myself minimalist at all.
I want to give my compliments to Australia. Ever since your government paid a few million dollars for a Jackson Pollack painting, I figure that it must be a marvellous country.
Music is essentially built upon primitive memory structures.
I was once married to a woman who could eat anything and tell you what was in it: the most complicated recipes. Her memory of taste – now that’s what I call memory!
If you think you might have secret information listening to me, you’re lost.
Since music has never had a Rembrandt, we have remained nothing more than musicians.
After all, Jews invented psychiatry to help other Jews become Gentiles.
I never understood what rules I was supposed to learn, and what rules I was supposed to break.
Do we have anything in music that really wipes everything out? That just cleans everything away?
I’m not suspicious, I’m just careful.