Meredith Monk Quotes

While it is true that Frank had a great sense of humor, he was also very serious about composing music. In reality there are only a handful of skilled players who can play his most complex pieces. It takes a lot of patience to learn and requires a fantastic memory.

Stravinsky is masterly: his harmony is conceived so precisely that it can only be the way it is.

It seemed like the more complex the music we were playing, the less able we were to guarantee its consistency.

Each track has to be precise, and that is a problem on a rhythmically complex track like 'Slaughtered.'

Still more astonishing is that world of rigorous fantasy which we call mathematics.

To be an outstanding musician, you have to be very attentive to the smallest detail and willing to have infinite patience in the pursuit of your ideal. You require absolute control and professionalism.

[Golf]is deceptively simple, endlessly complicated. A child can play it well, and a grown man can never master it. Any single round of it is full of unexpected triumphs and perfect shots that end in disaster. It is almost a science, yet it is a puzzle without an answer. It is gratifying and tantalizing, precise and unpredictable. It requires complete concentration and total relaxation. It satisfies the soul and frustrates the intellect. It is at the same time, rewarding and maddening. And it is without doubt the greatest game mankind has ever invented.

Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.

Make sure your message is clear, yet that you are faithful to its complexity.

The artist must be like a heart surgeon. He must approach something with sympathy, but with a sort of coldness and work and work until he finds some kind of perfection in his work. You can't have blood splashing all over the place. Things must be done very cleanly.

One must be strict even in little things.

Nothing matches the holiness and fascination of accurate and intricate detail.

Distrust even Mathematics; albeit so sublime and highly perfected, we have here a machine of such delicacy it can only work in vacuo, and one grain of sand in the wheels is enough to put everything out of gear. One shudders to think to what disaster such a grain of sand may bring a Mathematical brain. Remember Pascal.

Everything is both simpler than we can imagine and more entangled than we can conceive.

To condense fact from the vapor of nuance.

Everything is simpler than you think and at the same time more complex than you imagine

Nothing in life is ever as simple as we imagine.

The variety of all things forms a pleasure.

Do not imagine that these most difficult problems can be thoroughly understood by any one of us.

Everything is simpler than one can imagine, and yet complicated and inter-twined beyond comprehension.

If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching.

If you mess up the tiniest little thing in the Beethoven concerto, or the phrasing isn't just exactly perfectly executed, Beethoven brings out the worst in the best violinist. You almost never hear a satisfying performance, because it doesn't play itself.

Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them.

All writing is discipline, but screenwriting is a drill sergeant.

Simplicity is a most complex form