We think of music as this substance that flows - you turn on the tap, and there it is, streaming off your computer - but that's not how we evolved as a species. We evolved to listen to each other,… — Vijay Iyer Copy Share
What I find the challenge is with working with, say, digital machines - performing electronic music - is that when we play instruments there's… — Vijay Iyer Copy Share Image
I use are provisional terms, and they usually put any proper nouns in critical distance. I'm in a tradition of people who resist naming, fixity. That means it's a tradition of people who insist on mobility, who defy proper nouns and genres and those kinds of things. When I push back against the word 'jazz' it's because I've learned that… — Vijay Iyer Copy Share
It is one thing to be a virtuoso, but a different thing to play with compassion. — Vijay Iyer Copy Share Image
This is the last sentence of my dissertation: "What is soul in music if not powerfully embodied human presence?" — Vijay Iyer Copy Share Image
I find myself skeptical of music that forces you to have a certain experience, emotional reaction, or specific constructive arc of experience. But performers should still take care of that, to a certain extent - how does it add up? What you want from performance, because we're all in a room together, is that somehow we've gotten somewhere at the… — Vijay Iyer Copy Share
In the 1990s I got to play in a group that played in prisons in California. We would play in maximum security wards. It was infuriating. Those kinds of situations stick with me. We got to come in and play music for them because that's a way of caring, just offering something, a gift, basically. They're basically the most grateful… — Vijay Iyer Copy Share
I want to make sure that I represent a variety of backgrounds and that represents the reality out here in the world. — Vijay Iyer Copy Share Image
I've realized that a lot of people come to me because of what's called identity. In the sense of "he's like me" - more like identification. Identity is one of those nonsense words: it's been used so much it doesn't mean anything. As individuals, we don't want to stay the same; identity means sameness, and we don't want to be… — Vijay Iyer Copy Share
Beyond that, it gets down to the nuts and bolts of discipline - not a tradition or genre, I don't care about that, actually - but discipline in the sense of just working on music and working on thinking about music. It doesn't matter if it's jazz or not. It's about how we listen, how we interact, how we guide… — Vijay Iyer Copy Share
Music is made of what we do when we move, and we can only move in certain ways, in certain ranges of tempo because of the inherent constraints that our bodies offer, or you can call them 'affordances' - that's another word for me. It's a little more positive; doesn't make it seem like a limitation, but rather, a set… — Vijay Iyer Copy Share
The sense of having to be the best at everything gets in the way of anybody doing anything. I put all that aside; it's… — Vijay Iyer Copy Share Image
I like the idea of the objecthood of music being destabilized by process and things like improvisation. That's what empowers us; that's how we… — Vijay Iyer Copy Share Image
