Aaron Copland

You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.

Someone once asked me… whether I waited for inspiration. My answer was: ‘Every day!’

It made no sense to ignore them and to continue writing as if they did not exist. I felt that it was worth the effort to see if I couldn’t say what I had to say in the simplest possible terms.

The prospect of having to sit through one of Rachmaninov’s extended symphonies or piano concertos tends, quite frankly, to depress me. All those notes, and to what end?

The greatest moments of the human spirit may be deduced from the greatest moments in music.

Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes.

I wanted to do the music, but not at the expense of being happy.

I saw a vibraphone for the first time and knew immediately I had found my means of expression.

I like to sleep. There is no set time of day for sleep. You sleep when you’re tired and that’s all there is to it.

I think that those elements – light and sound – are beyond democratic. They’re into the creative part of life.

The point of Jazz is, you do something and then you go on.

I loved the feeling that I got singing.

I don’t really get nervous, I prepare. When the music messed up in the beginning, it tapped into my nerves and when you’re nervous and vulnerable, something special and something different can happen.

She’s Dynamite’ was a 100 years ago, and I recorded that song because the company thought that it was a great song and it was hot. That was the beginning of rock n’ roll, and I guess they thought it would be a BB King version of rock n’ roll.

That’s the thing about jazz: it’s free flowing, it comes from your soul.

Music is the shorthand of emotion

Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of someone else.

And if I had a preference, it would be to be able to not be in the studio until 4 in the morning.

My style is to just play. The more “live” you capture your music-the more unthought-out-the more magical it is.

It isn’t where you came from, its where you’re going that counts.

Quiet is the absence of sound. Silence is the presence of silence.