If the music is good, and if it makes sense as a strong structure and as a drama, and things happen as a result of what happened before, not just as …

- Missy Mazzoli

I have this ideal listener, as John Cage did. This listener doesn't bring expectations that my music will fit into some part of music history, or tha…

- Missy Mazzoli

There's some ambient music that doesn't do anything. I wouldn't say that that's narrative. It is narrative in that it creates a sort of world where n…

- Missy Mazzoli

I'm not religious, but I've always been attracted to the rituals of religion; as a kid, Sunday church was the closest thing I had to an interactive, …

- Missy Mazzoli

For me, writing music is a way of processing the world. It's not a concrete thing, as in, "This piece is about giraffes." It's much more of an emotio…

- Missy Mazzoli

I write my music with the idea that it will appeal to all of those people, and I want them to go in with all the history that's within all of us - al…

- Missy Mazzoli

I feel like there's not this black-and-white division between concert hall music and music that bands play in a bar. I don't know if this was ever tr…

- Missy Mazzoli

I want my music to be something that people use in order to access parts of themselves. So in that sense, every piece I write is about all emotions a…

- Missy Mazzoli

I don't think that those things [so called common practice] ever truly existed in the way that we like to believe that they do, the way we learn abou…

- Missy Mazzoli