Aaron Copland

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.

The greatest moments of the human spirit may be deduced from the greatest moments in music.

The main thing is to be satisfied with your work yourself. It’s useless to have an audience happy if you are not happy.

I adore extravagance but I abhor waste.

The prospect of having to sit through one of Rachmaninov’s extended symphonies or piano concertos tends, quite frankly, to depress me. All those notes, and to what end?

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.

One chord is fine. Two chords are pushing it. Three chords and you’re into jazz.

I wanna hear myself everywhere

Silence is what makes music sexy. I just move blocks of silence around. The notes are an afterthought.

Life is not about finding our limitations, it’s about finding our infinity.

If you’re gonna sing meaningful songs, you have to be committed to living a life that backs that up.

And there is a time where you can be beyond yourself. You can be better than your technique. You can be better than most of your usual ideas. And this is a whole other category that you can get into.

When I decided that I wanted to be a Jazz musician, I knew that it was about improvising.

It’s all music.

I like an element of chaos in music. That feeling is the best thing ever.

A band ought to have a sound all of its own. It ought to have a personality.

Breathe…. breathe a lot!

Man, you tell a story.

Somebody asked me once, ‘Do you think that swing will ever come back?’ And I said, ‘Do you think the 1938 Form will ever come back?’

I have no one style.

I never set out to find a style of my own, it just happened.