I haven’t understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.
He was a six and a half foot scowl.(on Rachmaninov)
Old age is a time of humiliations the most disagreeable of which for me is that I cannot work long at sustained high pressure with no leaks in concentration.
Childhood – a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.
Conformism is so hot on the heels of the mass-produced avant-garde that the ‘ins’ and the ‘outs’ change places with the speed of mach 3.
Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.
I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the varieties of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.
Music is given to us specifically to make order of things to move from an anarchic individualistic state to a regulated perfectly concious one which alone insures vitality and durability.
I am in the present. I cannot know what tomorrow will bring forth. I can know only what the truth is for me today. That is what I am called upon to serve.
The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music they should be taught to love it instead.
Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?
Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody’s piano playing in my living room has on the book I am reading.
Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.
Music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time.
The principle of the endless melody is the perpetual becoming of a music that never had any reason for starting, any more than it has any reason for ending.
Conductors’ careers are made for the most part with ‘Romantic’ music. ‘Classic’ music eliminates the conductor we do not remember him in it.
A plague on eminence! I hardly dare cross the street anymore without a convoy, and I am stared at wherever I go like an idiot member of a royal family or an animal in a zoo; and zoo animals have been known to die from stares.
I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.
I am in the present. I cannot know what tomorrow will bring forth. I can know only what the truth is for me today. That is what I am called upon to serve, and I serve it in all lucidity.
Money may kindle, but it cannot by itself, and for very long, burn.