Evan Parker Quotes

There was one thing Beethoven didn't do. When one of his string quartets was played, you can believe the second violin wasn't improvising.

Reading music is something that's inherently hateful to me. It makes music like mathematics.

A lot of music is mathematics. It's balance.

Music is really, really mathematical.

Writing music is very, very clinical. You just sit down at a piano, map out a theme and when all the technicalities come together, out pours the music.

I had a system, and the system worked.

In contrast, traditional classical music starts from an abstract musical schema. This is then notated and only expressed in concrete sound as a last stage, when it is performed.

That is basically me, and although I have done many things in my life - conducting, playing piano, and so on - what is fundamental is my being a composer.

I played trumpet in the school bands. I learned things I liked to play on my trumpet, but I didn't learn why this note goes with this note and why it produces that sound. Or how to create tension in the composition.

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

All musicians are subconsciously mathematicians.

A melody is not merely something you can hum.

Classical - perhaps I should say 'orchestral' - music is so digital, so cut up, rhythmically, pitchwise and in terms of the roles of the musicians. It's all in little boxes. The reason you get child prodigies in chess, arithmetic, and classical composition is that they are all worlds of discontinuous, parceled-up possibilities.

My music is simple stuff. Anybody can sit down, look at a set of symbols and produce sounds the music represents.

I just can't read music.

I never learned to read music.

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

It has never been necessary for me to learn how to read music.

Many, many composers have only found their way to a certain form, through familiarizing themselves with texts.

A symphony is no joke.

And the invention of transformations of certain figures has become the most important in musical composition.

If I get an idea for a song, I have a melody for it. I'm a musician first. I'm not limited by the fretboard.

A MIDI file contains coded instructions to play a particular series of notes on an electronic music synthesizer. A MIDI file is more like a piano roll in a player piano than any type of sound recording.

When we first started playing we did a lot of rehearsing. We used to write out everything. In fact, that's the way everybody rehearses: we play the tunes and improvise.

I still do not know where the notes will come from when I accept a commission for a new work.