Aaron Copland

You may feel depressed, but it can’t be so depressing that you can’t move. No, I would say that people create in moments when they are elated about expressing their depression!

Every symphony, for example, is a sonata for orchestra; every string quartet is a sonata for four strings; every concerto a sonata for a solo instrument and orchestra.

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.

To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.

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?

Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes.

Man, if you gotta ask you’ll never know.

Always keep reaching.

If you are not doing what you love, you are wasting your time!

Jazz attracted me because in it I found a formal perfection and instrumental precision that I admire in classical music, but which popular music doesn’t have.

The saxophone is an imperfect instrument, especially the tenor and soprano, as far as intonation goes. The challenge is to sing on an imperfect instrument that is outside of your body.

I just remember always trying to emulate Dinah Washington, hanging out in my bedroom closet.

The point of Jazz is, you do something and then you go on.

Musicianship is using your two ears.

All musicians stimulate each other. The vibrations get scattered around.

The blues fitted in with the early 60s, the social way of life at the time.

It’s important to reflect on what made Jazz so special.

If I don’t practice for a day, I know it… for two days, the critics know it… three days, the public knows it.

When you are so strongly drawn to music, you can’t ‘not’ be a musician.

Finally Beiderbecke took out a silver cornet. He put it to his lips and blew a phrase. The sound came out like a girl saying ‘yes.’

Everybody that you could name would join in our audiences from, Laguardia on down. Everybody came. Everybody came to the Cotton Club.