Paul McCartney Quotes

Listen to the triple fugue in 'Magnificat' - the first subject is seven voices, the second one has 52 different voices, the third uses five; then I combine all together. Such textures you cannot call primitive.

Classical music presents some of the world's most challenging pieces.

I played a lot of Bach's partitas and sonatas; I like the way that Bach was abstracting already from these dance forms.

My music is tonally based. There is plenty of dissonance, but it's used as a contrast. There is polytonality at times and a lot of rhythmic interplay.

To me it's no accident that all the symphony orchestras around the world tune up to the note A. And A is 440 cycles, except in Germany where it's 444. But the universe is 450 cycles. So what I'm trying to say is, I think it's God's voice, melody especially. Counterpoint, retrograde inversion, harmony... that's the science and the craft.

The way Fatboy Slim layers motifs is the same as 18th-century baroque counterpoint. You have an idea, then you have an answer to the idea in another voice, then you have a counter idea accompanying the original idea, and you build up your texture like that. I'm really into Kruder and Dorfmeister at the moment, and they do the same thing.

There's a richness to the old works if you look before the 1950s. The chord progressions and the language was more complicated, especially in the jazz and classical world.

If you have a piece by Bach, he often develops the piece to such a high level that you can hardly do much more to it. But Saint-Luc wrote very simple baroque music, and so if you do not embellish it, it just falls apart. It's way too simple.

What makes a Beethoven symphony spectacular, what makes a Brahms rhapsody spectacular is that the patterns are wondrous.

In my piano concerto I developed this polyphony to much higher complexity.

To my mind and ear, there is simply nothing that compares to the musical sophistication of a late Beethoven, Bartok, Schubert or Brahms work for minimal forces.

Harmony is an obscure and difficult musical science, but most difficult to those who are not acquainted with the Greek language; because it is necessary to use many Greek words to which there are none corresponding in Latin.

The further the music develops, the more complex the apparatus used by the composer to express his thoughts becomes.

So I concentrated on the rhythmic side of things, and therefore left a lot of holes. I didn't want to use big pad chords everywhere. All of the songs are built up of small melodies and counter melodies all played very rhythmically.

A symphony is no joke.

Well I guess my music came to prominence around one piece called 'In C' which I wrote in 1964 at that time it was called 'The Global Villages for Symphonic Pieces', because it was a piece built out of 53 simple patterns and the structure was new to music at that time.

There are only so many notes so there must be only so many melodies.

You don't go out and play Beethoven's 'Opus 111' without having rethought about it every time you play.

As far as favorite tunes, 'You Know You Know' is one, and why it is important is difficult to say. The rhythmic cycle is very interesting and challenging to play, since it can be considered three bars of 4/4 or four bars of 3/4. 'The Dance of Maya' is another, and I have to mention 'Sanctuary.'

There are only seven chords, and I believe every song has already been written.

There's nothing I really wanted to record more than Bach. It's wonderful music. It's - on a grand scale, there's a lot to it. There are - I can work on it for a long time and keep discovering more things, you know, that surprise me every time.

I'm not a total chump. I write stuff that's reasonably musically complex.

I love songs with, like, six or seven or eight different things going on at once, and that's just me.

Music is science more than art, and it is the main code of the universe.

I came from a Conservatoire background where the idea of complexity was very much bound up with good music - good music was seen as complex and difficult to understand.