David Russell Quotes

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

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.

You want something by Bach? Which one, Johann Sebastian or Jacques Offen?

Bach's music is really some of the greatest. I think, in some ways, Bach is the most profound composer of all.

I like being in a recording studio. I like watching a song go from the simplicity of the original music.

Probably the most reliable comfort music for me over the years has been Bach.

Writing music is not so much inspiration as hard work.

Just, you know, you can't put bread in a cold oven. You know, you've got to take your time. You've got to heat it up. So that's what, that's what I like to do with my music. I like to build it, and build it into a maddening, exciting crescendo.

I don't see how they can with most of my pieces, but I think it's unfortunate that they can through familiarity with flashy performances of a great deal of other music.

What came to me as a revelation was the use of rhythm in developing an overall structure in music.

In serial music, the series itself is seldom audible... What I'm interested in is a compositional process and a sounding music that are one in the same thing.

I see it as my job to try to keep Bach in the mainstream and present his music with, rather than without, its emotional core.

One thing I've tried to do in writing music is take on very basic things, very archetypal things.

I like classical music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and I adore Bach above all.

I've done a lot of performance practice, Baroque playing, and some of the joy and the challenge of it is figuring out what the composer intended... You have music of the 17th century - it's all whole notes and half notes. But inside of that, there are so many things that one can do, at least according to what we know about performance practice.

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.

Here's how I understand music. If you can play the same bunch of noise twice, it's music. To go beyond that is supercilious and pontificating.

It's interesting about classical music that the more you hear something, the more you get to know a piece, the better and better it gets, period, which is just an interesting thing on it.

The music that I make is built on layers upon layers of musical ideas. I want to keep it fun and fresh to where listeners won't get everything from just one listen. They can go back to it months, weeks, or even years later and hear something that they didn't ever hear before. That's what it's all about.

I always think it's important to choose your initial theme very carefully because you're going to be married to it for a long time. You might have to generate an hour's worth of music from a very short, little piece of theme.

But those musics do not address the larger kind of architecture in time that classical music does, whatever each one of us knows that classical music must mean.

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.

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

For me, you can put on something by Bach, and I'll feel better.

As a songwriter, simplicity - what not to do, what not to play - can be the hardest thing to achieve.