top of page
.png){kind=small}
"What is American music? The most satisfying answer I've come across is that it was a kind of natural comfort with the vernacular which is diverse and regional; it's not one particular set of sounds."
Standard
Customized
More
"A song is anything that can walk by itself."
Author Name
Personal Development
"People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around - the music and the ideas."
Author Name
Personal Development
"All truthful music is familiar to the ear, for its notes were written into our souls long ago."
Author Name
Personal Development
"This land is your land and this land is my land, sure, but the world is run by those that never listen to music anyway."
Author Name
Personal Development
"88% of what we call good songs aren't really good. They merely remind us of a good time we once had."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Strains of music spring up, crystallizing in the night air like rain turning suddenly to snow, drifting to earth."
Author Name
Personal Development
"A tapping foot isn't the best a listener can get from a song: A good song makes a listener dance. A great song makes him think."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Music has always gotten me through life, particularly honest, real music."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I aim my arrangements at what will fit and colorfully frame the song in the best way possible."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I don't use old music."
Author Name
Personal Development
More
"It seems to me opera is just as relevant as an expressive art as anything else."
Art
"Our most intimate contact with civilizations long since dust has been through the art which has survived them."
Art
"America tends to worship the modest talent because it doesn't put us in an uncomfortable position vis-a-vis the artist."
Talent
"I had all the normal interests - I played basketball and I headed the school paper. But I also developed very early a great love for music and literature and the theater."
Love
"When I've seen my operas in Europe, they have always struck me as more American than when I hear them here. I can't tell you what that phenomenon is."
American
"If an American audience is given a serious musical theater piece that is well produced, dramatically gripping and wonderfully acted, they'll respond to it."
American
"Like any other composer of opera, I choose a subject not for polemical reasons, but because it contains vivid characters in highly charged dramatic situations."
Opera
"We think the Puritans always dressed in black and white, which they didn't. They loved very bright colors. And there were other differences in perceptions that gave one a very different view of them."
Colors
"People in very high places suddenly fall, and we are always surprised because we don't factor in the basic element that they're humans and, therefore, they are flawed and have weaknesses."
People
"There is something inherent in our democracy that tends to want to level. America is a little uncomfortable in the presence of someone who is distinctly superior in whatever way."
America
bottom of page