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

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….

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

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 ….

I adore extravagance but I abhor waste..

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

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

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 fac….

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

A melody is not merely something you can hum..

Arthur V. Berger commenting on the music of Aaron Copland: Here is at last an American that we may place unapologetically beside the great recognized….

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

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….

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 ….

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 ins….

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

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….

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….

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

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