Claude Levi-Strauss Quotes

I was horrified by modern 12-tone music. I said to myself, 'Maybe I can find something different... maybe salvation, liberation, is possible.

Any musician who has not experienced - I do not say understood, but truly experienced - the necessity of dodecaphonic music is USELESS. For his whole work is irrelevant to the needs of his epoch.

Spent the fortnight gone in the music room reworking my year's fragments into a 'sextet for overlapping soloists': piano, clarinet, 'cello, flute, oboe, and violin, each in its own language of key, scale, and color. In the first set, each solo is interrupted by its successor; in the second, each interruption is recontinued, in order. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished, and by then it'll be too late.

I certainly had no feeling for harmony, and Schoenberg thought that that would make it impossible for me to write music. He said, 'You'll come to a wall you won't be able to get through.' So I said, 'I'll beat my head against that wall.'

It appears to me that the subject of music, from Machaut to Boulez, has always been its construction. Melodies of 12-tone rows just don't happen. They must be constructed....To demonstrate any formal idea in music, whether structure or stricture, is a matter of construction, in which the methodology is the controlling metaphor of the composition...Only by 'unfixing' the elements traditionally used to construct a piece of music could the sounds exist in themselves--not as symbols, or memories which were memories of other music to begin with.

Some song ideas absolutely require a kind of rigid discipline, and others require absolute chaotic abandon. The form is only valid if you know how to un-form it. I don't mean to sound like an intellectual here!

We cling nervously to the melody, but we don't handle it freely, we don't really make anything new out of it, we merely overload it.

With a computer, there are too many choices, and I always liked working within limits. You know, if you look at Mozart, who had this strict classical framework - an allegro, an andante, a scherzo and a finale - you see that within that formula, he got results he might never have gotten if he had all the options in the world.

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.

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.

To my mind and ear, there is simply nothing that compares to the musical sophistication of a late Beethoven, Bartok, Schubert or Brahms work for minimal forces.

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.

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

Well I guess my music came to prominence around one piece called 'In C' which I wrote in 1964 at that time it was called 'The Global Villages for Symphonic Pieces', because it was a piece built out of 53 simple patterns and the structure was new to music at that time.

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

To judge a composer's work, one must consider it as a whole.

You don't go out and play Beethoven's 'Opus 111' without having rethought about it every time you play.

You can't write much quality, original music on a concertina.

You have to open the music, so to speak, and see what's behind the notes because the notes are the same whether it is the music of Bach or someone else.

I love listening to things like those wonderful piano pieces of Stockhausen. It's just not my thing as a composer or performer, and thank goodness we're not obliged to be Modernist any more.

There are only seven chords, and I believe every song has already been written.

The thing I find frustrating about rock music is, how different can you make an acoustic drum kit sound, an electric guitar and vocals?

Western music is Bach, Handel and Schubert. It's good music, cleverly done. As a musician, I can see that.

Just like using an instrument, a song calls for different things.

I was fortunate enough to work at the peak of the great golden age of musicals. And then for awhile, I think they were being advanced in different ways. Andrew Lloyd-Webber brought the rock beat to musicals; people tried different things. The joy of musicals is that there is no perfect recipe; it is what you throw into it.