Aaron Copland Quotes (13 Quotes)

When I speak of the gifted listener, I am thinking of the nonmusician primarily, of the listener who intends to retain his amateur status. It is the thought of just such a listener that excites the composer in me.

I heard these guys play at St. George earlier this year, and they mentioned they do educational programs,

To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.

So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning.

Here were the tart herbs of plain American speech, the pasture, without the flowers of elocution... the clean rhythms... the irony and the homespun tenderness that, in a fine perforation, reached a sustained exaltation.

There is something about music that keeps its distance even at the moment that it engulfs us. It is at the same time outside and away from us and inside and part of us. In one sense it dwarfs us, and in another we master it.

You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down... some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, "Is there a meaning to music?" My answer would be, "Yes." And "Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?" My answer to that would be, "No."

Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for forty-five minutes.

Arthur V. Berger commenting on the music of Aaron Copland Here is at last an American that we may place unapologetically beside the great recognized creative figures of any other country.

If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.

A melody is not merely something you can hum.

Inspiration may be a form of super-consciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness I wouldn't know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.