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

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking "Is there a meaning to music?" My answer would be, "Yes", And "Can you state in so many words ….

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

The melody is generally what the piece is all about..

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

You may be sitting in a room reading this book. Imagine one note struck upon the piano. Immediately that one note is enough to change the atmosphere ….

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 sens….

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

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 m….

Music that is born complex is not inherently better or worse than music that is born simple..

If you want to know about the Sixties, play the music of The Beatles..

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

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 permane….

I hope my recordings of my own works won't inhibit other people's performances. The brutal fact is that one doesn't always get the exact tempo one wa….

Composers tend to assume that everyone loves music. Surprisingly enough, everyone doesn’t..

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

I adore extravagance but I abhor waste..

When I speak of the gifted listener, I am thinking of the nonmusician primarily, of the listener who intends to retain his amateur status. It is the ….

I don't compose. I assemble materials..

A great symphony is a man-made Mississippi down which we irresistibly flow from the instant of our leave-taking to a long forseen destination..

The inspired moment may sometimes be described as a kind of hallucinatory state of mind: one half of the personality emotes and dictates while the ot….