Quotes

The key to the understanding of contemporary music lies in repeated hearing; one must hear it till it sounds familiar, until one begins to notice false notes if they are played. One must make the effort to retain it in one’s ear, and one will always find that the accurate memory of sounds heard coincides with the understanding of them. In fact, the power to retain sounds by memory implies that they have been mastered. For the ear by its nature seeks out patterns and relationships, and it is only these patterns that we can remember and that make music significant for us.

-Roger Sessions from “Composers on Music”

Music is Easy. Children start off life with this belief. If no one shoots them down, they may retain a positive outlook. I myself always believed, perhaps even arrogantly, that music was easy to do and nothing to worry about. If something is hard to play, my gut feeling is that I haven’t seen the simplicity in it yet. That reflects my instinctual belief that all music is easy.

-Kenny Werner from Effortless Mastery – Book & CD Edition – (By Kenny Werner, Includes Compact Disc)

I was guided by no system whatever in Le Sacre du printemps. When I think of the other composers of that time who interest me – Berg, who is synthetic (in the best sense), Webern, who is analytic, and Schoenberg, who is both – how much more theoretical their music seems than Le Sacre; and these composers were supported by a great tradition, whereas very little immediate tradition lies behind Le Sacre du printemps. I had only my ear to help me. I heard and I wrote what I heard, I am the vessel through which Le Sacre passed.

- Igor Stravinsky, Expositions and Developments, 1962

How lucky is the man who, like Mozart and others, goes to the tavern of an evening and writes some fresh music. For he lives while he is creating, though he does what he likes.

Johannes Brahms. From Letter to Clara Schumann, Hanover, February 12, 1856.

Whether you are speaking or making music, communication requires that you say something. If you cloak yourself in emotional struggles and disguises, there is no real “you” to communicate; you don’t come through. Think of a moment when someone revealed his vulnerable self to you through a shy glance, a quivering voice, a halting gesture, or a warm and touching musical phrase. We cherish such moments, for they express the humanness within us. Remember this the next time you find yourself perching uncertainly on the edge of the unknown. Trust yourself, and dare to express yourself genuinely.

From “The Art of Practicing: A Guide to Making Music from the Heart” by Madeline Bruser

His creation was spontaneous and miraculous. He found it without seeking it, without foreseeing it. It came on his piano suddenly, complete, sublime, or it sang in his head during a walk, and he was impatient to play it to himself. But then began the most heart-rending labor I ever saw. It was a series of efforts, of irresolutions and of frettings to seize again certain details of the theme he had heard; what he had conceived as a whole he analyzed too much when wishing to write it, and his regret at not finding it again, in his opinion, clearly defined, threw him into a kind of despair. He shut himself up in his room for whole days, weeping, walking, breaking his pens, repeating a bar a hundred times, writing and effacing it as many times, and recommencing the next day with a minute and desperate perseverance. He spent six weeks over a single page to write it at last as he had noted it down at the very first.

from George Sand, Histoire de ma vie (1854)