Morton Feldman Quotes

31 quotes in 442 categories

• Art in relation to life is nothing more than a glove turned inside out. It seems to have the same shapes and contours, but it…
• I have a very dear friend, a great painter, called me up very upset, the work wasn’t going well… He asked me to come to…
• Do we have anything in music that really wipes everything out? That just cleans everything away?
• Boulez, who is everything I don't want art to be... Boulez, who once said in an essay that he is not interested in how a…
• At one point [Cardew] taught himself to play guitar simply in order to take part in the performance in a composition by Boulez, which is…
• I never understood what rules I was supposed to learn, and what rules I was supposed to break
• 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…
• Any professional knows that the flute and the piano is a boring combination. All you've got to arrive at is a kind of typical gestural…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• We do not hear what we hear..., only what we remember.
• 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…
• Music is essentially built upon primitive memory structures.
• Most music is metaphor, but Wolff is not. I am not metaphor either. Parable, maybe. Cage is sermon.
• The composer makes plans, music laughs.
• After all, Jews invented psychiatry to help other Jews become Gentiles.
• 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?
• To me, I took a militant attitude towards sounds. I wanted sounds to be a metaphor, that they could be as free as a human…

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