Quotes About Interpretation

Verbal communication about music is impossible except among musicians.

Although I am basically self taught, I consider Debussy my teacher - the most important elements are colour, light and shadow.

The peculiar characteristic of classical music is that it is really better than it sounds.

Indeed, man only exists insofar as he expresses himself. Music does it in musical ideas.

I only want to give a metaphysic for my music.

A 'scream' is always just that - a noise and not music.

There is a great correlation between music and images.

I can find something between sight and hearing and I can produce a fugue in colors as Bach has done in music.

I try to make sure that the Buddhism is more or less implicit in the music rather than explicit

To me, that's what music is: creating a mood, and taking the listener to the place that you're going.

Music must be listened to; it is not enough to hear it. A duck hears also.

The saxophone is actually a translation of the human voice, in my conception. All you can do is play melody. No matter how complicated it gets, it's still a melody.

People are always asking me to do Shakespeare - at home, at colleges, on film locations, in restaurants. It's like playing a piece of music, getting all the notes. It's great therapy.

You may dream freely when you listen to music as well as when you look at painting. When you read a book you are the slave of the author's mind.

I had another dream the other day about music critics. They were small and rodent-like with padlocked ears, as if they had stepped out of a painting by Goya.

I really feel instrumental music can speak - can contain tremendous amounts of information - but it's speaking to your subconscious.

I had a big background in listening to classical music and I started trying to compose, like I was playing the guitar but I heard an orchestra in my head.

If this word "music" is sacred and reserved for eighteenth and nineteenth century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound.

Our language for describing emotions is very crude... that's what music is for, I guess.

I listened to many different types of instruments and music, and have always tried to look at the bass as an instrument as opposed to only a bass.

We deliberately used elements from Brazilian music and from African and Asian music. Now people can hear that but then it sounded so abstract, they couldn't hear it.

Jazz is not something that can be defined through blunt instruments. It is much more poetic than that.

My music wouldn't sound the way it does if I hadn't had the experience of conducting.

John Cage made you realise that there wasn't a thing called noise, it was just music you hadn't appreciated.