Morton Feldman Quotes

#1. Artists talk a lot about freedom. So, recalling the expression "free as a bird," Morton Feldman went to a park one day and spent some time watching our feathered friends. When he came back, he said, "You know? They're not free: they're fighting over bits of food.

John Cage

#2. Yesterday was good, but let us dream and work hard to make tomorrow even better.

Debasish Mridha

#3. Music is essentially built upon primitive memory structures.

Morton Feldman

#4. He knew most men only heard what they wanted to hear, and he had no desire to be like most men.

Dan Groat

#5. At one point [Cardew] taught himself to play guitar simply in order to take part in the performance in a composition by Boulez, which is a little like saying he learned Danish to read Kiekegaard.

Morton Feldman

#6. Here's the rule that I set for myself, and I believe it - even on a show like 'Curb Your Enthusiasm': the more personal you are, the wider your audience.

David Steinberg

#7. The tragedy of music is that it begins with perfection.

Morton Feldman

#8. No one has the Houdini school of composition.

Morton Feldman

#9. Technology is killing us. We think it's helping us but it's killing us. Don't ask me why because I don't have the time or the attention span to complete that thought. Now let's all hold hands and draw spider monkeys.

Thom Yorke

#10. I'm not suspicious, I'm just careful.

Morton Feldman

#11. To understand what music has to be, you have to live for music. Who's ready to do that?

Morton Feldman

#12. For years I said if I could only find a comfortable chair I would rival Mozart.

Morton Feldman

#13. We do not hear what we hear ... , only what we remember.

Morton Feldman

#14. Since music has never had a Rembrandt, we have remained nothing more than musicians.

Morton Feldman

#15. The most interesting aspect for me, composing exclusively with patterns, is that there is not one organizational procedure more advantageous than another, perhaps because no one pattern ever takes precedence over the others.

Morton Feldman

#16. After all, Jews invented psychiatry to help other Jews become Gentiles.

Morton Feldman

#17. Right, except I'm not going to lie to my mom, because what kind of bastard lies to his own mother?

John Green

#18. I don't put off any time with my grandchildren. I don't put off a thing.

Lynn Redgrave

#19. For me it's the instrument. If I want to think of a flute and the state of the arts I hear a vibrato; I don't know what a flute is unless the person plays it for me.

Morton Feldman

#20. Most music is metaphor, but Wolff is not. I am not metaphor either. Parable, maybe. Cage is sermon.

Morton Feldman

#21. Google is my rapid response research assistant. It's the Swiss Army knife of information retrieval.

Lloyd Grove

#22. The composer makes plans, music laughs.

Morton Feldman

#23. Music can imply the infinite if enough things depart from the norm far enough. Strange "abnormal" events can lead to the feeling that anything can happen, and you have a music with no boundaries.

Morton Feldman

#24. Do we have anything in music that really wipes everything out? That just cleans everything away?

Morton Feldman

#25. Compositionally I always wanted to be like Fred Astaire.

Morton Feldman

#26. I never feel that my music is sparse or minimalist; the way fat people never really think they're fat. I certainly don't consider myself minimalist at all.

Morton Feldman

#27. I want to give my compliments to Australia. Ever since your government paid a few million dollars for a Jackson Pollack painting, I figure that it must be a marvellous country.

Morton Feldman

#28. If you think you might have secret information listening to me, you're lost.

Morton Feldman

#29. Any professional knows that the flute and the piano is a boring combination. All you've got to arrive at is a kind of typical gestural crap, right? You might agree, though you wouldn't call it gestural crap.

Morton Feldman

#30. I never understood what rules I was supposed to learn, and what rules I was supposed to break

Morton Feldman

#31. What was great about the 50s is that for one brief moment - maybe, say, six weeks - nobody understood art.

Morton Feldman

#32. Art in relation to life is nothing more than a glove turned inside out. It seems to have the same shapes and contours, but it can never be used for the same purpose. Art teaches nothing about life, just as life teaches us nothing about art.

Morton Feldman

#33. The love of every single one of my lives.

Alyson Noel

#34. I've been living with the minor second all my life and I finally found a way to handle it.

Morton Feldman

#35. Dark clouds cannot hide the sun forever.

Anonymous

#36. I was once married to a woman who could eat anything and tell you what was in it: the most complicated recipes. Her memory of taste - now that's what I call memory!

Morton Feldman

#37. Boulez, who is everything I don't want art to be ... Boulez, who once said in an essay that he is not interested in how a piece sounds, only how it is made.

Morton Feldman