Aaron Copland

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 one wants, although one improves with experience.

During these years I began to feel an increasing dissatisfaction with the relations of the music-loving public and the living composer. It seemed to me that we composers were in danger of working in a vacuum.

Some twenty years ago, during the course of a memorable evening at the Stravinskys’ home in Los Angeles, the venerable maestro turned to me and said in no uncertain terms: ‘My dear, you should conduct your own music. All composers should conduct their own music!

Mozart in his music was probably the most reasonable of the world’s great composers. It is the happy balance between flight and control, between sensibility and self-discipline, simplicity and sophistication of style that is his particular province… Mozart tapped once again the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breath-taking rightness that has never since been duplicated.

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.

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 other half listens and notates. The half that listens has better look the other way, had better simulate a half attention only, for the half that dictates is easily disgruntled and avenges itself for too close inspection by fading entirely away.

I did all you can do with a clarinet. Any more would have been less.

Jazz music has become academic. Sometimes that doesn’t feel right to me.

My audience was my life. What I did and how I did it was all for my audience.

I don’t do something because I think it’ll sell 30 million albums. I couldn’t care less if it sells just one.

While many attempts have been made to define Jazz, what’s the point really. Jazz is to be experienced – period.

I think you have to leave a lot to the imagination!

By and large Jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.

When you know the lyrics to a tune, you have some kind of insight as to it’s composition. If you don’t understand what it’s about, you’re depriving yourself of being really able to communicate this poem.

If one were asked to name one musician who came closest to composing without human flaw, I suppose general consensus would choose Johann Sebastian Bach.

Jazz is not a what, it is a how.

Whenever there’s a change with Jazz and its aesthetics, it’s almost always reflected with a change in the culture.

For me, there wasn’t a line between working and getting paid or simply playing for fun.

There’s millions and millions of people who think Les Paul is a guitar!

The fans dictate to you when you’re done!

There are no natural barriers. It’s all music.