When I was 14, I came very close to becoming a gay teen suicide 'statistic,' but I then turned to music, my piano, my loved ones, and discovered that it does in fact get better.
From day one when you're singing, you're dreaming about making that first album and making your break into whatever music you want to break into.
I hate the rock music tradition. I can't bear it!
Musicians are there in front of you, and the spectators sense their tension, which is not the case when you're listening to a record. Your attention is more relaxed. The emotional aspect is more important in live music.
Avant-garde music is sort of research music. You're glad someone's done it but you don't necessarily want to listen to it.
Lyrics are always misleading because they make people think that that's what the music is about.
In England and Europe, we have this huge music called ambient - ambient techno, ambient house, ambient hip-hop, ambient this, ambient that.
I don't like headphones very much, and I rarely listen to music on headphones.
Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing - 'Oh, let's put that sentence there, let's get rid of this' - have become commonplace in films and music too.
The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one's furniture.
Perhaps when music has been shouting for so long, a quieter voice seems attractive.
Although cover notes for classical music albums tend to say that the trill of flutes suggests mountain streams and so on, I don't think anybody listens to music with the expectation that they're going to be presented with a sort of landscape painting...
I wouldn't call myself a synaesthete in the sense that Nabokov was. But I'll talk about a sound as being cold blue or dark brown. For descriptive purposes, yes, I often see colors when I'm listening to music and think, 'Oh, there's not enough sort of...
With recording, everything changed. The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one's furniture. It's an idea that many composers have felt reluctant about because it seemed to ...
Classical - perhaps I should say 'orchestral' - music is so digital, so cut up, rhythmically, pitchwise and in terms of the roles of the musicians. It's all in little boxes. The reason you get child prodigies in chess, arithmetic, and classical compo...
Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music - not like a record that you'd put on, which would play for a while and finish.
Once music ceases to be ephemeral - always disappearing - and becomes instead material... it leaves the condition of traditional music and enters the condition of painting. It becomes a painting, existing as material in space, not immaterial in time.
I used to think that, given enough goodwill, anybody would be able to 'get' any music, no matter how distant the culture from which it came. And then I heard Chinese opera.
There are certain sounds that I've found work well in nearly any context. Their function is not so much musical as spatial: they define the edges of the territory of the music.
When I finish something, I want it out that day. Pop music is like the daily paper. Its got to be there then, not six months later.
Agressive music can only shock you once. Afterwards its impact declines. It's inevitable.
