Irving Harper Quotes

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!

I don't think anyone has exhausted the range of sound possible in a conventional rock band, but people do become slaves to their own easiest techniques.

So writing a song is much harder than doing a classical piece for me, because in a classical piece, I can just let the mood dictate what's going to happen.

A lot of great creativity comes from restrictions.

If Mozart were around now he would write a killer rock song.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

My creativity thrives with limitations.

Many times in music, if you are given limitations, it expands the creativity.

I'm not a tabula rasa type. In some ways, the more constraints I have, the work is more interesting to me.

Usually I like to improvise. Sometimes, depending on the nature of the piece, I like to improvise because I think it brings certain freshness and a reality to it, as long as it doesn't go too far out of the box.

Music. It's all creativity right here, right now.

What makes a Beethoven symphony spectacular, what makes a Brahms rhapsody spectacular is that the patterns are wondrous.

I think that of my 21 symphonies, each has its own place.

When you sample something, you're using the crutch of borrowing chords and melodies from a song that's already great, that's already stood the test of time, that's already special. When you're trying to do it all from scratch, you're writing something brand new that has to stand on its own.

If they had Mozart today, they couldn't work with him, although he was a very adaptable man.

Some people really want to play Mozart and be just performers. I was more interested in invention.

In Atlanta, there's no limitation to where you can take your music. You can be as creative as you want to be.

I found the blues too limiting, and classical was too disciplined.

I put together the influences of my life in as clear a way as I possibly can, in the same way that Beethoven or Schoenberg or Bach put their influences together.

My general take on American music since 1969 is that it's just getting stiffer and people are getting more uptight - audience, performance, and palace guard.

Gershwin inspired me very much. The concept of 'That Lucky Old Sun' was inspired by 'Rhapsody in Blue' - not influenced, but inspired.

I think you can't repeat beats. If you're doing something in one book, you can't do the exact same thing in another book.

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

The melody will tell me what the song should be about, the tone of the song. That's when the intellect comes in. Because I have a list of possible titles and concepts, and I expand on that.

If someone wants to make very, very original music that no one has ever heard before, you shouldn't know anything about music. It just narrows you down, you know?