Musical Abstraction Quotes

I think music has gone through a period of something very severe, rather radical, rather the way painting did with cubism.

...A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.

Music is the most abstract of the arts and also the most physical....music is under two signs, the stars and the wine

There are beautiful sounds in rock. Very lazy, dreamlike noises. You can forget about the lyrics in most songs. Just dig the noise, and you've got your sound...We're musical primitives.

Music, first of all, is completely about abstraction, which is exactly what architecture is not. In a way, it has been incredibly constructive to know what true abstraction is. So you don't fall into the trap of thinking that what you do is abstract.

It's a mystical quality of music, that music isn't really concrete, and it's communicating abstractions about imaginary worlds. At least, my music's like that. It's not real. It's unreal, it's all fabrication. To write a song about Obama would suddenly break the spell.

I played a lot of Bach's partitas and sonatas; I like the way that Bach was abstracting already from these dance forms.

The music is the imperative. It has the upper hand. I think all music, even though it's an abstraction, does motivate a particular meaning. Then it's the job of the musician to honor that meaning and to somehow implement lyrical material that can accommodate that emotional environment.