Aaron Copland

Composers tend to assume that everyone loves music. Surprisingly enough, everyone doesn’t.

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 music was never meant to be soporific.

It made no sense to ignore them and to continue writing as if they did not exist. I felt that it was worth the effort to see if I couldn’t say what I had to say in the simplest possible terms.

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 permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.

I adore extravagance but I abhor waste.

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 away from us and inside and part of us. In one sense it dwarfs us, and in another we master it. We are led on and on, and yet in some strange way we never lose control.

I never stop being amazed by all the different ways of playing the guitar and making it deliver a message.

I’ve been a jazz artist playing pop and R&B my entire career.

Jazz is so incestuous that it’s starting to kill itself.

I tried to connect my singing voice to my guitar an’ my guitar to my singing voice. Like the two was talking to one another.

When the music changes, so does the dance.

You can make a saxophone into an electric organ; you can do everything with it.

When I began listening to saxophones, I was first attracted to Coleman Hawkins.

There’s a way of playing safe and then there’s where you create something you haven’t created before.

Improvisation is the most widespread of all musical activities. Why did so many people spend so long pretending it never happened?

In fact, I heard Bird first, and had got well into listening to him. You know, it’s the kind of accidental thing that awareness of a player is: what’s available, what somebody happens to play for you.

Vocalists must study music and know everything an instrumentalist needs to know.

But I have always suspected that one could substitute the Minuet of Haydn’s 98th symphony for the Minuet in Haydn’s 99th symphony without sensing a serious lack of coherence in either work.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

It is great to have your own label; you can cultivate your own artists… I’ve worked with pretty much everyone I wanted to.

Miles told me not to use vibrato because when you get old, you’re going to shake anyway.