Musical Contrast Quotes

I've played the clarinet since I was a kid. I love to sing, but I'm not much of a singer. Let's say that when it comes to vocalizing, I have the soul of Billy Bigelow but the voice of Jigger Cragan.

Erik Satie does not say the opposite of Debussy; he says the same thing only the other way round.

Gospel music is never pessimistic, it's never 'oh my god, its all going down the tubes', like the blues often is.

I started a big band when grunge was popular. I mean, that didn't make much sense.

But the difference between the little pieces and the big pieces - I'm not actually sure which are the little pieces. With some of the big pieces, it's a lot of musical running around, whereas the little pieces, you can say everything you want to say.

I don't like to hurry. I'm not a conductor of the fast, fiery romantic type. I prefer Bruckner, with the sincerity of his musical language and the huge time spans in which his ideas develop, to Mahler, with his hysteria and self-indulgence.

Silences between movements are employed only in order to bring the opposing duo to the fore.

I'm very interested in the distance and the space between those two poles: very concrete, song-based stuff on the one hand and very improvisational, abstract stuff on the other. I don't see any reason music should exclude one or the other, and I think the pairing of them together makes for very interesting music in a lot of ways.

Elvis is not so difficult as Johnny Cash because his voice is so distinctive. If you try to copy Johnny Cash, it's just going to sound dumb.

But when you hear the complete album, it gets dark, really straight-up rock, with some really intimate moments with just me and the piano. It's not completely me because there are parts of me that aren't on that song, that are on the album.

You can communicate a sad message or perplexing message through happy chords or a happy melody, and I hope to have the listener pose more questions in their life as opposed to going along with the everyday and what's being pushed on them.

Originally, the lyrics to "Girl" were really upbeat, and then it didn't work for me somehow. You need the dichotomy. If you're doing something happy and light, you need the shadows.

Anything that's resolvable is boring, musically. And if it's too chaotic, you don't feel tension; it's chaos.

I think what we find fascinating and interesting is when people take our music and turn it into emotionally something else. And weirdly, Lorde's version of 'Everybody Wants to Rule the World,' the production really goes with the lyric more than our version does, because our version, albeit the lyric is dark, the music is quite uplifting.

The creation and destruction of harmonic and 'statistical' tensions is essential to the maintenance of compositional drama. Any composition (or improvisation) which remains consonant and 'regular' throughout is, for me, equivalent to watching a movie with only 'good guys' in it, or eating cottage cheese.

Ah, it's awesome learning about theater, but it's a completely different musical landscape from rock and roll.

Musical themes developing is a lot of what classical music is based on, and exposition and recapitulation - these kinds of things I find oppressive.

So, you can set up an orchestra down this end of the railway station playing one particular area, and simultaneously at the other end something completely different going on. And in the middle they meet, or not, depending.

I feel like artists that are always quite sad in real life always make really happy music, and artists who are really bouncy and bubbly always make really sad music.

Conceptually, I've always gravitated towards arrangements that weren't just presenting one idea. I like to look at my songs as having a main part, an interlude, and almost like another song at the end.

Rilo Kiley was a rock band, so I wanted my solo records to feel different.

The fourth album encapsulated some remarkable music that was really groundbreaking. We were able to have something like 'When the Levee Breaks,' which, sonically, was very menacing. But then you had the flip side: something like 'Going to California,' which is really intimate.

I was more of a melodic player. Angus was more into the rock world. Straightaway, I said this is how we should do it. It was never a brotherly squabble but the opposite, because we just wanted to do good as a band.

What I think of when I think of nu-metal: structured, heavy music that has a point. It's angry just like all the other music, but the bigger parts are bigger and the powerful parts are more powerful and the slow parts slower.