Jamie Muir Quotes

Being honest and spontaneous is important when making music. But I'm also really logical when I compose.

Music is all about training in harmony, training to understand and use musical energy for our greater pleasure by attuning to the natural laws of the universe.

If I get an idea for a song, I have a melody for it. I'm a musician first. I'm not limited by the fretboard.

I'm not a frustrated concert composer, and the concert pieces I've done have been a small part of my work. What I've sought there is instruction, variation from the demands of film and relief from its restrictions.

To be a good improviser, you have to study composition as a parallel. Because what improvisation is, on a high level, is spontaneous composition.

There is a basic language of music that I think is important for communicating with other musicians - just the kind of terminology that might make it easier to describe your ideas to the other guys in your band.

Being a musician, there aren't that many ways for me to consciously use a more strategy, math-based part of my brain.

I began to realize that some of the things Ornette Coleman had said about things being played three or fours ways, independently of each other, were true because Bach had also composed that way.

Business logic and musical logic are utterly incompatible.

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.

People don't realize you're blowing over changes, time changes, harmony, different keys. I mark a point in my solo where it's got to peak at point D I go to A, B, C D then I'm home.

I can play songs that I hear from a movie and just play it a few times on the keyboard. I will hit all the notes on the keyboard until I find the right key, and then I will play the rest of the song.

I played piano, I learned a lot about music.

A lot of music is mathematics. It's balance.

I know a few chords on the guitar, but I wouldn't be able do a show or even be part of a jam session with one.

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

I will never master this craft. Orchestras are very, very forthcoming with me.

I've never really been schooled in music theory. I'm a guitar player, and I attack the guitar in a certain way that it not fully unique to me, but it's more unique that some other people.

That's the beauty of music. You can take a theme from a Bach sacred chorale and improvise. It doesn't make any difference where the theme comes from; the treatment of it can be jazz.

Music is made up out of these building blocks. Studying how these blocks go together and what they consist of and the math of how it works - it's all the same stuff; it's just different aesthetics that we're talking about.

Many, many composers have only found their way to a certain form, through familiarizing themselves with texts.

And the invention of transformations of certain figures has become the most important in musical composition.

I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the variety of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.

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

The relation between practical and spiritual spheres in music is obvious, if only because it demands ears, finger, consciousness and intellect.