When you hear Bach or Mozart, you hear perfection. Remember that Bach, Mozart and Beethoven were great improvisers. I can hear that in their music.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes that the mastery of classical composers involved not just perfection, but also creativity and spontaneity.
Dave Brubeck highlights the notion that when listening to the music of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, one perceives their technical perfection. However, he reminds us that these composers were also great improvisers, suggesting that their genius stemmed from a blend of both meticulous craftsmanship and creative freedom, which together contribute to the beauty and depth of their works.
In practice
In a speech about creativity in music, you might say, 'As Dave Brubeck observed, the great improvisers like Bach and Mozart remind us that perfection in art requires spontaneity.'
One of the reasons I believe in jazz is that the oneness of man can come through the rhythm of your heart. It’s the same anyplace in the world, that heartbeat. It’s the first thing you hear when you’re born — or before you’re born — and it’s the last thing you hear.
I knew even if I'm a cowboy, I'm going to be involved in jazz in some way.
What I want to happen is to be really creative, and to play something new in the improvisations, every time.
Many people don't understand how disciplined you have to be to play jazz... And that is really the idea of democracy - freedom within the Constitution or discipline. You don't just get out there and do anything you want.
I’m beginning to understand myself. But it would have been great to be able to understand myself when I was 20 rather than when I was 82.
I got a poster from Columbia Records, and there's Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus, Ellington, Count Basie - everybody in that poster has died, I'm the only one left. And great players like Paul Desmond and Gerry Mulligan, it's hard to believe they're gone because we were all so close. But I believe in the future and the tradition will go on.
If I were reading a book and happened to strike a wonderful passage I would close the book then and there and go for a walk. I hated the thought of coming to the end of a good book. I would tease it along, delay the inevitable as long as possible, But always, when I hit a great passage, I would stop reading immediately. Out I would go, rain, hail, snow or ice, and chew the cud.
You don't have to make something that people call art. Living is an artistic activity, there is an art to getting through the day.
My experience with casting children is that... the whole movie is going to rest on their shoulders, so you have to set aside time and wait for the perfect people to appear.
At the end of the day, 'Shuffle Along' is about people coming together and making something extraordinary - and history not necessarily being kind to them. It's about the love of necessarily being kind to them. It's about the love of doing, regardless of the consequences.
Who among us has not dreamt, in moments of ambition, of the miracle of a poetic prose, musical without rhythm and rhyme, supple and staccato enough to adapt to the lyrical stirrings of the soul, the undulations of dreams, and sudden leaps of consciousness.
When I was in Cambridge reading mathematics, I went to Amsterdam for the International Mathematics Congress. There I saw M.C. Escher's fascinating work. That inspired me to try my hand at drawing such impossibilities.
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