Edgard Varese Quotes

#1. The beginning of art is not reason. It is the buried treasure of the unconscious ... that unconscious which has more understanding than our lucidity.

Edgard Varese

#2. A man is culpable in the eyes of society when he escapes from the jurisdiction of its mediocrity.

Edgard Varese

#3. Now that we're essentially an indoor species, walled off from the world of other life forms, we're divorced from the very domain that supports and sustains our lives.

Charlie Cook

#4. Music, which should pulsate with life, needs new means of expression, and science alone can infuse it with youthful vigor.

Edgard Varese

#5. Our musical alphabet is poor and illogical.

Edgard Varese

#6. Music is organized sound.

Edgard Varese

#7. Contrary to general belief, an artist is never ahead of his time but most people are far behind theirs.

Edgard Varese

#8. The best thing to learn from any government is that it does not get affacted by what other people talk or think about it.

Amit Kalantri

#9. I don't want to write any more for the old Man-power instruments and am handicapped by the lack of adequate electrical instruments for which I now conceive my music.

Edgard Varese

#10. No matter how consummate a work of art may seem, it is only an approximation of the original conception. It is the artist's consciousness of this discrepancy between his conception and the realization that assures his progress.

Edgard Varese

#11. Men set themselves a goal, and having attained it, are satisfied and grow paunches. In their complacency they forget that their only future is now death.

Edgard Varese

#12. There is an idea, the basis of an internal structure, expanded and split into different shapes or groups of sound constantly changing in shape, direction, and speed, attracted and repulsed by various forces.

Edgard Varese

#13. What's four years in our long American history? Remember when I asked that wheelchair-bound politician to "stand up." It turns me off when people say Donald Trump is authentic. Just because he says "Mexican rapists." What about me? I am the real deal.

Joe Biden

#14. Instead of buying into the global agenda, which is using food as just industrial stuff, we would say we view food as biological, a living thing, that belongs in smaller communities.

Joel Salatin

#15. I'm never going to say, 'Well, I'm never going to do comedy again.' I love comedies, and it's what people know me for, so I love doing it ... I don't really think about it in terms of 'Well, I should do this because it's comedy or drama.'

Bill Hader

#16. A work of art must make the rules: rules do not make a work of art ... I tell people I am not a musician; I work with rhythms, frequencies and intensities ... tunes are merely the gossips of music ...

Edgard Varese

#17. I do not write experimental music. My experimenting is done before I make the music. Afterwards it is the listener who must experiment.

Edgard Varese

#18. Everyone is born with genius, but most people only keep it a few minutes.

Edgard Varese

#19. The present day composer refuses to die.

Edgard Varese

#20. I was not influenced by composers as much as by natural objects and physical phenomena.

Edgard Varese

#21. In every domain of art, a work that corresponds to the need of its day carries a message of social and cultural value. It is the artist who crystallizes his age ... who fixes his time in history.

Edgard Varese

#22. I rather like a certain clumsiness in a work of art.

Edgard Varese

#23. There are two infinities: God and stupidity.

Edgard Varese

#24. I have just begun a work in which an important part is given to a large chorus and with it I want to use several of your instruments - augmenting their range as in those I used for my Equatorial - especially in the high range.

Edgard Varese

#25. I dream of instruments obedient to my thought and which with their contribution of a whole new world of unsuspected sounds, will lend themselves to the exigencies of my inner rhythm.

Edgard Varese