Morton Feldman Quotes

And I like to interpret music. So I think it's all interpretive.

When you play a violin piece, you are a storyteller, and you're telling a story.

Obviously, a bass sounds like a bass and a guitar sounds like a guitar, but the way you play the guitar reflects your personality.

The way to do it is to put as much life into the song as I can. You can either get it to breathe or you can't.

I don't play classical guitar. But I do in my mind. I've got it on a stand.

With few exceptions, music has been for some centuries the art which has devoted itself not to the reproduction of natural phenomena, but rather to the expression of the artist's soul, in musical sound.

The soprano turned out to sound to me like the right hand on the piano.

The hardest of all the arts to speak of is music, because music has no meaning to speak of.

Songs suffer at the mercy of the performer.

Music is a reservoir... of sounds.

I think of a piece of music as something that comes alive when it is being performed, and I feel that my role in the transmission of music is to be its best advocate at that moment.

I can't play any instrument for the life of me, but I know what I want to hear.

I'm always imagining some sort of story behind the song, even the ones I haven't written. I'm actively engaging in playacting.

To say to the painter that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano.

I agree totally with Metheny regarding the sound influencing the way you play.

Music is emotional, and you may catch a musician in a very unemotional mood or you may not be in the same frame of mind as the musician. So a critic will often say a musician is slipping.

I don't think it's about playing and singing, to be honest. That seems like old news, you know? I wasn't thinking about that. I just think that's in my body now. Dancers don't think about their legs moving one way and their arms moving another. Over time, you incorporate that into your instrument.

If there is no music, I will perish. While I have not learnt music, I can play the tune that comes into my head on the keyboard.

Music is very abstract. When we talk about music, we're not discussing the music itself but rather how we react to it.

I've spent my life playing music.

I played the flute in elementary school, but when I got into high school, they didn't have any flutes; they gave me a clarinet and said, 'Play it in the same way, just hold in a different position.' I really didn't care much for it.

Just because you have developed the craft on your instrument doesn't mean that you don't have the ability to be expressive emotionally on that instrument, or vice versa.

Music is a very physical experience, and I need to understand things physically to be able to create the narrative for them.

I can't play an instrument to save my life. But when I'm creating, and when I'm making music, I feel like I'm the head of the orchestra, and I'm just waving my wand, and something is created.

With 'Stillness', I don't think I appreciated how very codified all the different genres were in radio formats and the various constituencies of the culture. But music is music, too.