Aaron Copland

A melody is not merely something you can hum.

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.

If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.

Is there a meaning to music? Yes. Can you state in so many words what the meaning is? No.

Someone once asked me… whether I waited for inspiration. My answer was: ‘Every day!’

For me, the most important thing is the element of chance that is built into a live performance. The very great drawback of recorded sound is the fact that it is always the same. No matter how wonderful a recording is, I know that I couldn’t live with it–even of my own music–with the same nuances forever.

When you want ’em you can’t get ’em, when you’ve got ’em, you don’t want ’em.

A great teacher stimulates his student’s creativity enough so that they go out and find the answers themselves.

Practice as if you are the worst, play as if you are the best!

Being so inescapably a part of it, I’ll never know what the listener gets, what the listener feels and that’s too bad.

I am the sum total of everything that I have experienced musically.

Musically, I love to talk just off the top of my head and that’s what Jazz is all about.

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

You want the audience to feel what you’re doing.

A chimpanzee could learn what I do physically, but it goes way beyond that. When you play, you play life.

I’m always looking to create new avenues or new visions of music.

I’ll keep evolving and put that into my songs.

We recorded to document ourselves, not to sell a lot of records.

Jazz will only go where we the composers and musicians take it. It is up to us.

I never practice my guitar. From time to time I just open the case and throw in a piece of raw meat.

I don’t believe music can be free unless it has something to be free from.