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"I think recordings have been a terrific advance because now, when you have a piece of music, particularly something that appears to the listener very complicated, there's really a push to the world to try to figure out what it was that he was hearing."
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"I think I first realized I wanted to be in country music and be an artist when I was 10. And I started dragging my parents to festivals, and fairs, and karaoke contests, and I did that for about a year before I came to Nashville for the first time. I was 11 and I had this demo CD of me singing Dixie Chicks and Leanne Rimes songs."

"Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder."

"When I first came to Nashville, people hardly gave country music any respect. We lived in old cars and dirty hotels, and we ate when we could."

"When there's music in your soul, there's soul in your music."

"Whether you listen to a piece of music, or a poem, or look at a picture or a jug, or a piece of sculpture, what matters about it is not what it has in common with others of its kind, but what is singularly its own."
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"Now, what we are not talking about, what you're really coming to, is what compromises one makes so that the listener understands somewhat of what you're doing, what you're trying to express."

"No, I think that a person writes a poem because they have an inner urge of something that they want to express, and I think it's that inner urge that you want to express when you write a piece of music."

"The difference between the student and the born composer is he really hears the thing, and they have to stage it and manipulate it by technical equipment."

"Because essentially Schoenberg was an extremely gifted man. And in spite of many of his theories and so on, when he really began to write music, he still was guided very much by his internal hearing, by what we call your internal ear."

"Well, no. I believe that it's not at all impossible that some of the performances that I've heard so far by some pianists may be superior to my own playing because those are two totally different acts altogether."

"I'm really interested in writing a piece of music that will move you, that will really move you. That is really the only reason that I'm writing music."

"We can use techniques in modifying things, in controlling things, but the first impulse has to be something that you simply cannot make just out of technique, or else it becomes perfectly evident that it is nothing but technique that you're exercising."
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