Charles Petzold Quotes

But I find that the keyboard is the complete instrument you know?

Classical - perhaps I should say 'orchestral' - music is so digital, so cut up, rhythmically, pitchwise and in terms of the roles of the musicians. It's all in little boxes. The reason you get child prodigies in chess, arithmetic, and classical composition is that they are all worlds of discontinuous, parceled-up possibilities.

My music is simple stuff. Anybody can sit down, look at a set of symbols and produce sounds the music represents.

Reading music is something that's inherently hateful to me. It makes music like mathematics.

I just can't read music.

I never learned to read music.

It has never been necessary for me to learn how to read music.

When we first started playing we did a lot of rehearsing. We used to write out everything. In fact, that's the way everybody rehearses: we play the tunes and improvise.

I write music visually.

I'm a composer like every maestro on this earth.

My whole life, I've been watching conductors. I was 7 the first time I played with a conductor. Seeing the ones that do it well, it's an amazing thing.

In contrast, traditional classical music starts from an abstract musical schema. This is then notated and only expressed in concrete sound as a last stage, when it is performed.

I know that John Adams has had a very hard time directing French ensembles.

That is basically me, and although I have done many things in my life - conducting, playing piano, and so on - what is fundamental is my being a composer.

Let me say that I've never thought to conduct because the conductor has to think to the music before the orchestra. And the orchestra comes later. For me, it's terrible.

I can take any series of numbers and turn it into music, from Bach to bebop, Herbie Hancock to hip-hop.

All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians.

I consider myself a composer.

I'm an interpreter of music.

I don't want to write any more for the old Man-power instruments and am handicapped by the lack of adequate electrical instruments for which I now conceive my music.

I listened to many different types of instruments and music, and have always tried to look at the bass as an instrument as opposed to only a bass.

Then certainly for a musician timing becomes something that is immediately accessible as a concept, because it's a necessity in ones everyday performance.

I hear entire symphonies, oratorios, in my head, but I can't write a note.

So in one sense you don't have the classic keyboard player in Yes.

A Beethoven symphony should be rehearsed like chamber music, only for a lot more people.