Top 40 Copland Quotes
#1. Copland was one of the first American composers to forge a truly modern style of American classical music while also making use of American popular music - including jazz.
Terry Teachout
#2. 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.
Aaron Copland
#3. You know, they were returning to the language of the people and trying to use musical language, particularly as Copland did to create a musical language in which all Americans would feel that they had a stake.
Michael Tilson Thomas
#4. Copland was the first important American classical composer to go to work for Hollywood.
Terry Teachout
#5. When I read Copland, I really wanted Stallone's part.
Ray Liotta
#6. Ladies and dogs," said Jeffrey, "we are about to perform 'Fanfare for the Uncommon Seal.' " "With apologies to Aaron Copland,
Jeanne Birdsall
#7. I came up in the '60s; that was a time when there was a revolution going on in music. Stravinsky had become a twelve-tone composer; even Aaron Copland was writing twelve-tone pieces at that time!
Paul Lansky
#8. Aaron Copland was a man that had a very specific point of view about what music should be which was that, he felt that new music should have the composer should show a personality in his music.
Elliott Carter
#9. To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.
Aaron Copland
#10. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, but love is the perfection of it.
'Perfection
Steve Copland
#11. The main thing is to be satisfied with your work yourself. It's useless to have an audience happy if you are not happy.
Aaron Copland
#12. If one were asked to name one musician who came closest to composing without human flaw, I suppose general consensus would choose Johann Sebastian Bach ...
Aaron Copland
#14. 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.
Aaron Copland
#15. Life without making progress is dead. What is life if you don't embrace new truths that scare you, meet people who intimidate you, and so on.
Assegid Habtewold
#17. If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.
Aaron Copland
#18. The greatest moments of the human spirit may be deduced from the greatest moments in music.
Aaron Copland
#19. 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. We are led on and on, and yet in some strange way we never lose control.
Aaron Copland
#20. You may feel depressed, but it can't be so depressing that you can't move. No, I would say that people create in moments when they are elated about expressing their depression!
Aaron Copland
#21. Music that is born complex is not inherently better or worse than music that is born simple.
Aaron Copland
#22. The fearsome critic and not-very-tough composer Virgil Thomson once drew up a set of rules for hearing an unfamiliar work; the last of those is the question I take with me to every new-music event: "Is this just a good piece of clockwork, or does it actually tell time?
Aaron Copland
#24. Every symphony, for example, is a sonata for orchestra; every string quartet is a sonata for four strings; every concerto a sonata for a solo instrument and orchestra.
Aaron Copland
#25. Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes.
Aaron Copland
#26. Composers tend to assume that everyone loves music. Surprisingly enough, everyone doesn't.
Aaron Copland
#27. 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.
Aaron Copland
#28. But I have always suspected that one could substitute the Minuet of Haydn's 98th symphony for the Minuet in Haydn's 99th symphony without sensing a serious lack of coherence in either work.
Aaron Copland
#29. 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.
Aaron Copland
#30. The melody is generally what the piece is all about.
Aaron Copland
#31. You may be sitting in a room reading this book. Imagine one note struck upon the piano. Immediately that one note is enough to change the atmosphere of the room - proving that the sound element in music is a powerful and mysterious agent, which it would be foolish to deride or belittle.
Aaron Copland
#32. Most people use music as a couch; they want to be pillowed on it, relaxed and consoled for the stress of daily living. But serious music was never meant to be soporific.
Aaron Copland
#33. Someone once asked me ... whether I waited for inspiration. My answer was: "Every day!"
Aaron Copland
#34. 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.
Aaron Copland
#35. A great symphony is a man-made Mississippi down which we irresistibly flow from the instant of our leave-taking to a long forseen destination.
Aaron Copland
#36. Is there a meaning to music? Yes. Can you state in so many words what the meaning is? No.
Aaron Copland
#37. 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'.
Aaron Copland
#38. If you want to know about the Sixties, play the music of The Beatles.
Aaron Copland
#39. I hope my recordings of my own works won't inhibit other people's performances. The brutal fact is that one doesn't always get the exact tempo one wants, although one improves with experience.
Aaron Copland
#40. Mozart tapped the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breathtaking rightness.
Aaron Copland
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