You don't have to worry about being a number one, number two, or number three. Numbers don't have anything to do with placement. Numbers only have something to do with repetition.
Ornette ColemanRead
We in the Western world suffer from too many categories and classes; we've forgotten that we all still have diapers on. We've separated music from life.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the separation of art and life in Western culture, reminding us of our shared humanity.
Ornette Coleman suggests that in the Western world, people have become overly concerned with classifying and categorizing aspects of life, including music, which in turn leads us to forget our fundamental similarities and the simplicity of our shared experiences. He implies that by creating divisions, we overlook the intrinsic connections between art and life, and the universal experiences that bind us together as human beings.
In practice
In a discussion about the value of art in society, this quote could serve as a reminder of our collective human experience.
You don't have to worry about being a number one, number two, or number three. Numbers don't have anything to do with placement. Numbers only have something to do with repetition.
You've got to realize. In the western world, regardless of what color you are, what title the music is, it's all played by the same notes.
So, for instance, if you came to me, I'd ask, 'Do you want to write? Do you want to improvise? Why do you want to play this instrument? What do you want to do?'
That's what I was trying to say when we were talking about sound. I think that every person, whether they play music or don't play music, has a sound - their own sound, that thing that you're talking about.
It's just someone has labelled us as having a different label to do what you do. I find that labels are the worst thing in the world for artistic expression.
I decided, if I'm going to be poor and black and all, the least thing I'm going to do is to try and find out who I am. I created everything about me.
Human nature is potentially aggressive and destructive and potentially orderly and constructive.
Rosencrantz: We might as well be dead. Do you think death could possibly be a boat? Guildenstern: No, no, no... Death is...not. Death isn't. You take my meaning. Death is the ultimate negative. Not-being. You can't not-be on a boat. Rosencrantz: I've frequently not been on boats. Guildenstern: No, no, no--what you've been is not on boats.
If we generally like the way things are now, we must also ask whether our current situation is really so different from the open ages of radio, film, or the telephone. Might it not also have seemed in those times that the orgy of limitless entrepreneurism would never end? The point is that we are near the high end of a pendulum arc that, so far, has aways begun to swing in the opposite direction -toward greater integration and centralization- with a force that can seem inexorable.
The word of man is the most durable of all material.
Thinking men cannot be ruled; ambitious men do not stagnate.
they go and set up free-will with the heathen philosophers and say that a man's free will is the cause why God chooseth and not another, contrary to all scriptures.
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