Chopin was a master of melody, harmony and voice leading - the art of smoothly moving from chord to chord.
Some voices don't blend. They just kinda rub against each other.
Very old music is, like, 11th century in my mind. That's very old.
Has it struck you that the music which is regarded as the most sublime in western civilization, which is the music of Bach, is called baroque?
All of my novels are democracies.
I began to realize that some of the things Ornette Coleman had said about things being played three or fours ways, independently of each other, were true because Bach had also composed that way.
I love the sound of voices singing together, congregational singing, anything like gospel, or folk, or sea shanties.
I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.
Thus the slogan should be reversed: Catholics taught the world what music is supposed to sound like, and, more importantly, what it is supposed to mean.
All the senses awaken and fall into harmony in poetic reverie. Poetic reverie listens to this polyphony of the senses, and the poetic consciousness must record it.
As for sacred polyphony, there is no reason to be afraid of it.
The strangest part of Indian music is its lack of chords: There's no such thing as major or minor, and it's unusual to hear more than two different pitches at the same time.
I listen to a lot of medieval music.
One of my favorite literary theorists, Mikhail Bakhtin, wrote that the defining characteristic of the novel is its unprecedented level of "heteroglossia" - the way it brings together so many different registers of language. He doesn't mean national languages, but rather the sublanguages we all navigate between every day: high language, low language, everything. I think there's something really powerful about the idea of the novel as a space that can bring all these languages together - not just aggregate them, like the Internet is so good at doing, but bring them into a dialogue.
When you listen to my music, you hear that there are all these voices going on in different parts of the song. That's because I was always around so many voices in church.
The compartmentalizing is so severe, that we kind of lose track. When you sit down to dinner with friends, you're going to talk about everything, sharing this polyphony of experiences, this spectrum of culture, and it's all cross-pollinating all the time.
There's nothing I love more in the world than layering voices.
Composers most identified with the chamber music form are Corelli, Vivaldi, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and, of course, Bach. Of course, Bach. If there is any one composer who gives us reason and emotion, it is Bach.
The element of harmony is super important.
Bach was a top harmonist geezer, which is why the jazz cats love him.
You need three or five hands to play Ligeti.
I've learned a lot from the masters of orchestration, like Ravel and Stravinsky.
If you've only got one horn playing, I still want the sense of ensemble.
I'm trying to make paintings like giant musical chords, with a polyphony of colours that is nuts but works.
I always think about music horizontally and vertically at the same time.
