His pagan barbarity, his explosive and angrily defiant melancholy, his demoniacal instinct . . . these are all echoes . . . of the thousand-year-old ….

Our peasant music, naturally, is invariably tonal, if not always in the sense that the inflexible major and minor system is tonal. (An "atonal" folk-….

With maturity comes the wish to economize - to be more simple. Maturity is the period when one finds the just measure..

Competitions are for horses, not artists..

Folk melodies are the embodiment of an artistic perfection of the highest order; in fact, they are models of the way in which a musical idea can be e….

In art there are only fast or slow developments. Essentially it is a matter of evolution, not revolution..

It may well be that some composers do not believe in God. All of them, however, believe in Bach..

I cannot conceive of music that expresses absolutely nothing..