Harold Prince Quotes

Because for me, '60s pop music is amongst the most complicated or complex music because it has so many resonances which strike you. The music itself is often simple, but the way that I interpret it, or the way I think it's interpreted culturally, is very complex.

Part of me is probably more conservative than people realise. I like my old string quartets, I don't like music that's trippy for trippy's sake.

Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.

I started to notice that simpleness is divine. I think we all start trying to use very complex harmonies and rhythms and all that because of a certain kind of ambition. But I was always trying to create something simple.

The simplest things in music are the ones that count. The simplest thing are, of course, also the most difficult to achieve and take years of work.

Sometimes I think some things just happen and are meant to be.

It's all for a reason and all happened the way it was supposed to happen.

I wrote 'We Got the Beat,' which is a fun song, and people equate us with fun, but there's so much more to us than that.

I let Brel into my world. What I like about him is the simplicity of his language. It's not so simple to be simple.

The simplest beats, on what rock music or any music has been formed on, can be the toughest beats to execute and perform, because it's really easy to not respect a simple 4/4 beat, because people always want to play fast.

You can get people to follow very intricate pathways of musical information, but it feels like a nursery rhyme or a children's story.

Life is complicated, and art has the right to be complicated, too. I don't like films that simplify.

Art is something that is so perfectly clear that no one comprehends it.

Complexity can be a trap. You can have a ball developing a phrase, inverting it, playing it in different keys and times and all. But it's really more introspective than communicative. Like a crossword puzzle compared to a poem.

I think you'll find it's a bit more complicated than that.

I guess the role of art is to make something that is ambiguous and complex.

So multifarious are the different classes of truths, and so multitudinous the truths in each class, that it may be undoubtingly affirmed that no man has yet lived who could so much as name all the different classes and subdivisions of truths, and far less anyone who was acquainted with all the truths belonging to any one class. What wonderful extent, what amazing variety, what collective magnificence! And if such be the number of truths pertaining to this tiny ball of earth, how must it be in the incomprehensible immensity!

I'm a minimalist at heart. If a song doesn't need a solo, I'm not going to force one into it.

Classical music gradually lost popularity because it is too complicated: you need twenty-five or thirty skilled musicians just to hum it properly. So people began to develop regular music.

Art is the filigrain of a little mind, and is twisted and involved and curled, but would reach farther if laid out in a straight line.

I've found in composing that being simple and profound—having in-depthness in your music—is the most difficult thing to do. Anybody can write a whole lot of notes, which may or may not say something . . . But why make it complicated for the musicians to play? Why make it difficult for the listeners to hear?

What I love about design is the artistic and scientific complexity that also becomes useful.

Scale is very, very important, like the scale of a person is very important. It's to do with the size of our space, the fact they are big sculptures, they are still human scale.

Music is like comedy in that you can enjoy a very - for want of abetter word - sophisticated classical piece as much as you enjoy something that's very simple pop.

whatever a work of art may be, the artist certainly cannot dare to be simple. He must have a nature as complicated and as violent, as totally unsuggestive of the word innocence, as a modern war.