Aaron Copland Quotes

26 quotes in 354 categories

• 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.
• Most people use music as a couch; they want to be pillowed on it, relaxed and consoled for the stress of daily living. But serious…
• The inspired moment may sometimes be described as a kind of hallucinatory state of mind: one half of the personality emotes and dictates while the…
• Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes.
• If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.
• 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…
• I adore extravagance but I abhor waste.
• 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…
• If you want to know about the Sixties, play the music of The Beatles.
• Composers tend to assume that everyone loves music. Surprisingly enough, everyone doesn’t.
• Music that is born complex is not inherently better or worse than music that is born simple.
• 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…
• 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…
• Someone once asked me... whether I waited for inspiration. My answer was: "Every day!"
• The main thing is to be satisfied with your work yourself. It's useless to have an audience happy if you are not happy.
• A melody is not merely something you can hum.
• 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…
• There is something about music that keeps its distance even at the moment that it engulfs us. It is at the same time outside and…
• 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.
• To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.

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