Aaron Copland

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

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.

Mozart tapped the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breathtaking rightness.

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.

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

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

I have a deep respect for harmony, melodic patterns and form.

Jazz is a sideways glance at music. It’s like being an architect, knowing the basis of design but understanding that the façade can be whatever you dream. I’m a free person. I don’t want to be tied down.

When I sing, trouble can sit right on my shoulder and I don’t even notice.

Jazz is an art that makes a person completely naked.

Sometimes I sound like gravel and sometimes I sound like coffee and cream.

And ultimately the people who produce my records, they know that they’re here to serve the purpose of me expressing who I am at this period of time and augmenting that or pulling it forward and I love that process.

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.

In our local Baptist church, I sang in the choir and formed a gospel quartet. When our minister caught me messing with his guitar, he taught me three positions – one, four and five. After that, I taught myself to play.

I became a singer to sing my songs. They’re so hip who else is going to sing them?

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

I compose my pieces with a formula that I created myself.

All I play is truth and emotion.

I could write six songs in one day with everything that’s going on.

Well, for me it’s – music is the instrument of life.

All this is saying is, OK I see now, the ‘hood does not quite want Shirley Bassey yet, so let me still give them this. Crack Music was made after Diamonds. After black people were like, ‘I don’t know about this one.’ It was like me reaching too high for the cookie jar.