Aaron Copland

Composers tend to assume that everyone loves music. Surprisingly enough, everyone doesn’t.

If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.

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.

So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning.

To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.

Every symphony, for example, is a sonata for orchestra; every string quartet is a sonata for four strings; every concerto a sonata for a solo instrument and orchestra.

I didn’t know the right names for anything at first, but I knew what knocked me out. Changes… man I dug.

Play it f**kin’ loud!

And then when I found my sound, it took me two and a half weeks to find my sound and when I did I pulled out all the stops, all the stops I could find.

Music was our wife, and we loved her. And we stayed with her, and we clothed her, and we put diamond rings on her hands.

A great symphony is a man-made Mississippi down which we irresistibly flow from the instant of our leave-taking to a long forseen destination.

Being a musician is what I do, but it’s not what I am.

My wife Martha used to call me Ol’ Lemon Face because of my facial contortions when I play Lucille. I squeeze my eyes and open my mouth, raise my eyebrows, cock my head and God knows what else. I look like I’m in torture, when in truth, I’m in ecstasy. I don’t do it for show. Every fiber of my being is tingling.

Never play anything the same way twice.

Why Jazz? This is just the way I see music.

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 would sit on the street corners in my hometown of Indianola, Mississippi, and I would play. And, generally, I would start playing gospel songs. People would come by on the street – you live in Time Square, you know how they do it – they would bunch up. And they would always compliment me on gospel tunes, but they would tip me when I played blues.

What we do as artists is a combination of experience and imagination. How that creeps into your work is not so linear.

I do the best I can with any instrument I get attracted to. But they’re just tools in order for you to express yourself and that’s really the upshot of it.

I’ve always had a deep love of live performance, it’s when I feel most alive.

I was never interested in singing in the church or school. I was more interested in becoming a musician.