Morton Feldman Quotes

Of all the arts, music is really the most abstract.

I have music in my brain all the time, all sorts.

My musical knowledge is so bad it's embarrassing. When composers discuss music with someone as primitive as myself, they have to talk about it in terms of senses and emotion, rather than keys and tempo.

Music assists him in the use of harmonic and mathematical proportion.

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.

Music is at once the product of feeling and knowledge, for it requires from its disciples, composers and performers alike, not only talent and enthusiasm, but also that knowledge and perception which are the result of protracted study and reflection.

My head works in music, so there's always music there.

There was one man who was interested in the color of music, the connection between light and music, and that was Einstein.

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.

I started studying music at the age of five and a half. My older sister was taking piano lessons. When her teacher left our apartment, I would get up on the piano bench and start picking out the notes that were part of my sister's lessons.

I never really trained to be a musician, but I've been playing guitar since I was around, like, 13 years old. For me, the guitar has always been the instrument that I've played. I play a little piano. I taught myself everything by ear. I don't read music at all, which has not really been a hindrance.

I've never known how to read music in my life.

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.

Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light.

There are only twelve tones and they need to be treated carefully.

There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is. But I've got it.

When I have to score a film, I watch the movie first and then start thinking about it. And from that moment on, it is as if I were pregnant. I then have to deliver the child, so from that moment on, I think always about the music - even when I go to the grocery store, I think about it.

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

I'm into scales right now.

Music exists when rhythmic, melodic or harmonic order is deliberately created, and consciously listened to, and it is only language-using, self-conscious creatures ... who are capable of organizing sounds in this way, either when uttering them or when perceiving them. We can hear music in the song of the nightingale, but it is music that no nightingale has heard.

I had an amazing French teacher in high school - it was the one class that I enjoyed. And I studied opera for 11 years, so I did a lot of singing in French.

Music is quite an enigma because it is many things together, and it is one whole body. Like a nucleus, it contains every idea, but the basic stand is the same.

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

Making music is all about forgetting about everything around you.

I believe that experimenting is what production is. But it doesn't mean much if you don't have a solid foundation in what you're experimenting with. You can't really deviate from music unless you know music; it's not gonna work.