Musical Patterns Quotes

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

So, essentially my contribution was to introduce repetition into Western music as the main ingredient without any melody over it, without anything just repeated patterns, musical patterns.

There are only seven chords, and I believe every song has already been written.

At its heart, music is all higher mathematics.

The only form of music is melody, without melody music is not feasible, and music and melody are quite inseparable.

There's some familiarity in Celtic music, even if you've never heard that piece of music before.

There are a lot of very strong connections with music and mathematics. They both can work in patterns and sequences and repetitions.

My drum parts are a song within the song; that's the way I look at writing my drum parts. They follow patterns, and they're written to interact with the rest of the band. There's quite a bit of thought that goes into it.

I'm into scales right now.

Well I guess my music came to prominence around one piece called 'In C' which I wrote in 1964 at that time it was called 'The Global Villages for Symphonic Pieces', because it was a piece built out of 53 simple patterns and the structure was new to music at that time.

By giving the public a rich and full melody, distinctly arranged and well played, all the time creating new tone colors and patterns, I feel we have a better chance of being successful. I want a kick to my band, but I don't want the rhythm to hog the spotlight.

I don't believe in original melodies. There are only so many computations of eight notes.

Bach was so mathematical and I liked this idea that you could have one instrument going, 'One, two, three, four', and then you have another instrument going, [double time] 'One, two, three four', and another instrument going, [doubled again] 'One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four', so you could add twos and fours and eighths, and that happens a lot in Bach.

The seven white notes on the piano - each section of the piece (there are 12 sections) is five of those seven white notes. If you calculate it, there are 21 groups of five notes in any group of seven notes. And although there are 12 sections, this piece actually uses nine of those groups because some of the sections repeat earlier ones. So that's the formula. It's very simple as a way of generating something. It's my inner minimalist.

Philosophically, I think riffs that start with E repeating itself are almost guaranteed to be great.

I listen to things that are popular and try to think about it in a mathematical way.

When I started rhyming, my favorite rhythms were from John Coltrane and some of the things he did on sax. And certain rhythms that I hear on drums, I try to emulate with my words, dropping on the same patterns that them beats or them notes would hit.

Because you've been exposed to Western tonal music, you know after a certain chord sequence what the next possibilities are. Your brain has compiled a statistical map of which ones are most likely and least likely. If the song keeps hitting the most likely notes, you'll get bored, and if it's always the least likely ones, you'll get irritated.

You can't be unique any way. Music is made from seven notes. You will always come back to something. Even if you think you are unique, you will come back to something that existed before you were doing what you are doing.

Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm.

Certainly, as a guitarist, I was aware of descending chromatic lines and arpeggios long before 1968.

The mathematics of rhythm are universal. They don't belong to any particular culture.

As a musician you fall into certain patterns that you're not conscious of, unless you start listening to yourself on tape a lot. If you do that you start recognizing habits; then you have to try and break them.

There are only so many chords and notes in the world.

Music is essentially built upon primitive memory structures.