Joseph Jarman Quotes

For me it's also - the music is equally as important. I mean I think as somebody who writes music, there just has to sort of be the marriage between both.

It's the coolest part about writing music. I don't know how other people work, but so much is derived from some amalgamation of all these different songs that I love. That's why they jump all over the place.

Usually when a song comes to me, I don't ask a lot of questions; I hear something, and I just let it out in song. It's like making a salad. Everything I hear, and everything I am, I mix together in a different way in each song.

Other people notice the same things but they don't think to put it to music.

Before you can make good music, you just have to shut up. Then the music can say what it has to say.

I'd always loved poetry and I'd always loved writing music and composing music, but I hadn't thought of putting the two together until around that time.

Music is supposed to be inspired.

I think it's being innovative and very creative to stay away from flat-out sampling somebody else's record. To me, that doesn't show too much of your creative side unless you take a little piece and add it, almost like spice on a chicken.

I want to take the great tradition of the orchestra within me, to take what the orchestra offers.

To a musician or songwriter, your canvas is silence.

I hope we [with Patrick Leonard] can come up with something orchestral with some spoken material. And I also, God willing, hope that perhaps another record of songs also might emerge, but one never knows.

I am going to write my symphony; I'm just going to start tomorrow.

The composer makes plans, music laughs.

I'm kind of lucky in the fact that I can take something that's in my head and write it down, or I can listen to a piece of music that somebody else has written and try to tap into what the music's saying and just kind of follow that, you know. I mean, nine times out of 10, I'm just kind of following where the music takes me.

Since age seven, I've been composing and have never stopped composing, yet, the creative process is as elusive to me as it has ever been.

We all love to sing, and when we sit down to write a song I think it kind of shows itself to us.

I always dreamed of writing in an orchestral context. But when you finish a piece, you want to hear it. So we played everything with Phish.

Writing music is not so much inspiration as hard work.

The way I create music is maybe like a painting, to compose in a more visual way. Basically it's the music that I want to hear- that's my inspiration and bottom line. I just try to get ideas from books, movies, paintings.

I write the vocals last, because I wanted to invent the music first and push the music to the level that I had to compete against it.

We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.

I can't just sit down and make a song in a day. It's only possible if you focus on the music and not the sound.

I try to steal something from the great singers. Of course, I don't want to imitate their sound, but I try to do a sort of compromise.

Sometimes I feel like a melody doesn't have anything to do with me, but it's just something that comes, is accumulated from me playing on the piano, and then this little creature just appears.

I began composing works which were imitative of the music I was being told about. I was also very interested in translating the music into visual terms.