There was this kind of dictatorship of the Darmstadt school, composers like Boulez and Stockhausen, who were very strict and orthodox. They would not allow other composers to write the music they wanted to write, and only a certain kind of music could be played.
I think that people are too... They've become genre snobs.
Mitch Miller knew exactly what he wanted me to sing. He didn't want me to improvise at all.
Music was everything. Now it is just not as important as it used to be. When I was growing up, where everyone was trying to outdo each other by being more outrageous and sounding more different, now there is a homogeneous sameness to it all.
For some reason, as a kid, I felt outwardly embarrassed to say that I liked rock music. I don't know where that came from. For me, it just wasn't cool - orchestral music was cool.
We were kind of caught up in the genre trap. We didn't really have a lot of artistic freedom. They wanted us to go into a certain direction, so they could promote us easier.
When I was a kid, it was so important to listen only to bands nobody had ever heard of. I missed out on so much interesting music because of my need to listen to a psychobilly band that only two people knew about... Because I thought I was cool.
You couldnt get a job playing in a club unless you played so much Top 40 and so many Beatles songs. I just went into a sort of revolt.
I don't want to be seen as this math-rock geek.
Music is of two kinds: one petty, poor, second-rate, never varying, its base the hundred or so phrasings which all musicians understand, a babbling which is more or less pleasant, the life that most composers live.
Rap is really just too conventional. Everybody does the same thing. No one ever pushes the box.
I felt that I really couldn't be creative with opera. You're supposed to sound this way here. You're supposed to crescendo here. You're supposed to do that. I had no sense of identity while singing that kind of music.
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.
Branding music as 'for the youth' is only an escapist tendency. Preference in music is only about restrictions of the mind.
A lot of jazz artists think people should like what they're doing just because it's jazz. I don't buy that.
If I like dubstep and electronic, why don't I make the violin fit me rather than making myself fit the violin?
I feel like certain people think that certain styles of music will taint their jazz style.
