Paul Hindemith Quotes

I think the origin of all this clamour for tonality is not so much the need to sense a relationship to the tonic, as a need for familiar chords: let us be frank and say "for the triad"; and I believe I have good reason to say that just so long as a certain kind of music contains enough such triads, it causes no offence, even if in other ways it most violently clashes with the sacred laws of tonality.

I enjoy having some boundaries to work within. That's why I generally don't like alternate tunings and stuff like that. I like the boundaries of regular tunings.

Only a tiny portion of music history involves a singer and a lyric. Songs in music are generally thought to be a minor form.

Eighty percent of my pieces gravitate towards an A, as a tonal thing, not at the beginning, but somewhere in it.

A scale is just the notes that are in a chord played one at a time instead of together. That's what has allowed me to go through the possible notes that work with a chord and make choices about which ones I like best. I go through by ear; you can do it by theory too, but the best way is to learn by ear.

Philosophically, I think riffs that start with E repeating itself are almost guaranteed to be great.

Theory and harmony broadened my mind in music. I know what music is made of.

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 some degree. I think that I've always been very much of a chordal person. The chords are the foundation of everything. Some of Yes' stuff is very linear, albeit complex, but it's single-line melodic stuff. So I kind of had to wear a different cap working with Yes. It's not so much chord-based.

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.

I'm an interpreter of music.

I worked hard learning harmony and theory when I was growing up in Chicago in the 1920s.

Even if you're improvising, the fact that beforehand you know certain things will work helps you make those improvisations successful. It really helps to have a certain amount of knowledge about musical structure.

Every song, the title dictates the architecture of the song.

I was always playing the Hammond Organ back to front even during the days of the Nice, going back to 1968. Really what I was doing there, was choosing notes at random and trying to make some sense of them, improvising back to front.

The third note in a chord is what depicts whether it's major or minor. Rhythm and Blues hardly ever uses it because it means that the melody is free to move between major and minor because you're not clashing with the third being depicted one way or the other.

I'm not interested in possible complexities. I regard song structure as a graph paper.

Einstein was very attracted to Mozart. There's a mathematical, classical structure to the music, and I think he identified with that very strongly. I think there also is a connection between being a genius and a polymath.

We always used to describe ourselves as an instrumental band. Basically, the music was always instrumentally based, so the songs always came later.

To be honest, I don't have a particular recipe, but I normally start with the chord progression and then I build it from there. I listen to a lot of jazz, so the chords are really important to me.

If the chords change a lot over the course of a song, it's better to stay within the same melodic structure.

Playing pentatonic scales over orchestral music is not something I want to do or listen to.

When I was a student, if you accidentally wrote a triad in a piece of yours, it was just sort of like you were breaking the law! You just couldn't do it. And that just meant you were a bad composer.

The feeling that you want the listener to get, you should get yourself when you first hit that chord, and that melody comes to mind.

I have been a tabla player since the age of four.