We accept so many things that come through the media; we get used to them, however vigilant we are. But for any creative art, you have to remain 110% conscious, and in a world that's losing consciousness, that's getting harder.

The work of Liszt I most admire is the music he wrote toward the end of his life. This is often music of tremendous inventiveness. The music seems to be seeking something. It tends to be restless, unpredictable, often very sad.

Complexity can be a trap. You can have a ball developing a phrase, inverting it, playing it in different keys and times and all. But it's really more introspective than communicative. Like a crossword puzzle compared to a poem.

Let the moment go. . . . Don't forget it for a moment, though. Just remembering you've had an "and" when you're back to "or" makes the "or" mean more than it did before. . . . Now I understand! And it's time to leave the woods.

I think back at the time, if it had been 1988, I would have thought Michael and Sarah probably would have been cast but I don't think, I think it's much better that the girl is younger and if Sarah would have been 26 or 27 then.

A good song is a nice set of chords and some good lyrics; a great song is a song that reinvents itself over time. That you can always find something interesting in the more you listen to it - it keeps revealing something to you.

I think the best live shows take you out of the moment into somewhere else and I really...This can be true of recorded music too but my favorite live experience is sort of this transcendendent - is that the word? Transcendental?

Sometimes on a film you just become taken with the fact that, all right this is as rough as it gets, but I'm going to support my general and I'm going to do the very best I can for him because he's a good general and I like him.

We cannot doubt that animals both love and practice music. That is evident. But it seems their musical system differs from ours. It is another school....We are not familiar with their didactic works. Perhaps they don't have any.

I think I'm always subconsciously trying to write the ideal school play. Lots of parts for everybody, great parts for women - don't forget, more girls try out than boys in the school play; everyone gets to be in the school play.

Music can make a difference. There is a global nature to music, which has the potential to bring all people together. Music is truly an international language, and I hope to contribute by widening communication as much as I can.

He taught me everything I know. Every note I write I learned from that man upstairs. People rave over my arranging today, and I just think to myself, God bless Tommy Dorsey. If it hadn't been for him, I never could have done it.

I believe that there are still people who believe that game music is something equal to just an effect incorporated into the game, something like a BGM. And therefore this is something that I would like to show that is not true.

I had always been more interested in playing and improvising than sitting down at a desk and writing out a piece. I'd always found it more fun to play, and the other a little bit tedious. I always had trouble with the decisions.

A lot of people record on a laptop and use plug-ins, which might be OK for the kind of music that they're doing. But for the kind of music that I'm doing, that just doesn't work. I can't cut corners; everything has to be organic.

I can speak for myself and say that a lot of times you just make mistakes! You're under pressure to get something done in a limited amount of time, and so you just dive in without really knowing what you're getting yourself into.

When someone asks me to do a score, I look at the picture two or three times. I never watch the rushes to pick up the mood as quickly as I can. If it's something I want to do, just watching the film will start the wheels turning.

How glad I am to be able to roam in the wood and thicket, among trees and flowers and rocks ... in the country, every tree seems to speak to me, saying, "Holy! Holy", in the woods, there is enchantment which expresses all things.

Often, especially young artists, you feel like you should be doing something. And I think that can be very destructive because creativity is about connecting with the stuff that's deep inside you and making something out of that.

There's always a question of duration, there's a question of who the orchestra is. No one is free to write what you want - you collaborate on a film score, and one of the good things is that someone else's work is motivating you.

My true function within a society which embraces all of us is to continue an age-old tradition. This tradition is to create images from the depths of the imagination and to give them form, whether visual, intellectual or musical.

Because neither she nor Port had ever lived a life of any kind of regularity, they had both made the fatal error of coming hazily to regard time as non-existent. One year was like another year. Eventually everything would happen.

But when culture becomes a baggage, things don't work. What is good about anything that feels like a baggage? I think we should let go when it feels like a burden. Hold on to the things you love. Then it will be a natural process.

I am now satisfied that the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called negro melodies. This must be the real foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States.

I don't like to do things the same way every time. You always want to be evolving as a composer, and if your creative process is exactly the same each time, then how do you expect today's work to be any different from yesterday's?

Revolutionaries themselves are the last people to realize when, through force of time and circumstance, they have gradually become conservatives. It is scarcely to be wondered at if the public is very nearly as slow in the uptake.

I wouldn't say that I'm actually trying to cause chills in the audience, but certainly my goal is to, at the very least, effect a physiological response - at the most, to effect some sort of state change, ideally, in the audience.

I believe that from that Earth emerges a musical poetry, which is by the nature of its sources tonal. I believe that these sources cause to exist a phonology of music, which evolves from the universal known as the harmonic series.

I think the tendency to paint composers or styles of music with too broad a brush - for example, identifying composers as writers of "simple" or "complex" music - has become increasingly problematic and is almost never productive.

Life doesn't just happen; it's constructed through the history of power. And that's something I am interested in and so is the art world: a world that's trying to engage socially, with a leftist slant, to work out how we got here.

I think that talking about the personal specificity, personal details, is how you get the big, big audiences - by talking about your relationships or your personal tragedies. If you reach out with that energy, you'll touch people.

Music is so essential to the Cuban character that you can't disentangle it from the history of the nation. the history of Cuban music is one of cultural collisions, of voluntary and forced migrations, of religions and revolutions.

Before that, an 8-bit recording was pixelated; it was really bad. It didn't serve what I was doing, which was recording live sound and delaying it and feeding it back. This is essentially what the EIS system is: a bunch of delays.

The business of finding a nation's soul is a long and slow one at the best and a great many prophets must be slain in the course of it. Perhaps when we have slain enough prophets future generations will begin to build their tombs.

In dancing the Alman the young men sometimes steal the damsels from their partners and he who has been robbed seeks to obtain another damsel. But I do not hold with this behaviour because it may lead to quarrels and heart burning.

The common root, of course, comes out of Africa. That's the pulse.The African pulse. It's all the way back from . . . the old slave chants and up through the blues, the jazz, and up through rock. And it's all got the African pulse.

Here, waltzes are called works! And Strauss and Lanner, who play them for dancing, are called Kapellmeistern. This does not mean that everyone thinks like that; indeed, nearly everyone laughs about it; but only waltzes get printed.

It scares me that people are going to stop writing music. I don't mean music that has to be physically written down, but they'll stop using their brain which is without a doubt the most powerful tool that you could have in any art.

There are three virtuous styles of music; classical, jazz and heavy metal. I do love classical music but I don't listen to it much anymore and I never listen to metal, so I am not very interested in music that is difficult to play.

The enormity of the universe revealed by science cannot readily be grasped by the human brain, but the music of The Planets enables the mind to acquire some comprehension of the vastness of space where rational understanding fails.

If you write something in the evening or at night, look back over it the next morning. I tend to be less self-critical at night; sometimes, I've looked back at things I wrote the night before, and realized they were no good at all.

If somebody says, 'Well, what are your favorite composers?' really, what they are saying is, 'What are your favorite composers apart from Bach?' Because obviously, Bach is your favorite composer if you are involved in music at all.

It is easier to analyze a work in its form, in its evolution, than simply to love it with all the living forces of our heart. It is easier to define its peculiarities and its details than to draw out of it its emotion, its thought.

I always think the relationship between a teacher and a student should be short and maybe violent. You don't need to spend years together. All you need is an explosion: you are the material to explode; the teacher is the detonator.

Only a certain number of people go to a store over the period of a year. When a person sees my record on the shelf, it eliminates someone else's record from being sold. It's about continuing to try to find new ways to sell records.

My mother insisted that I pursue music. I rented out my father's musical equipment and earned some money. As a child, I wasn't sure about a career goal, but I was always fascinated by electronic gadgets, specially musical equipment.

I don't think I am that materialistic, actually. Obviously at home in the country the art collection is important, but we have one big room in the middle of the house where we do everything - the television, the kitchen, everything.

I think the question of actually relating emotion to music is totally interesting. I believe that it is really important on some level, but it's also important not to impose your own emotions on some music that has its own emotions.

You know, I started in movies a long time ago, and once in awhile I'm taken aback. Sometimes one of my things will come on - they use my things as background music all the time, in somebody else's arrangements and It catches my ear.

I live neither in the past nor in the future. I am in the present. I cannot know what tomorrow will bring forth. I can know only what the truth is for me today. That is what I am called upon to serve, and I serve it in all lucidity.

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