Aaron Copland

Some twenty years ago, during the course of a memorable evening at the Stravinskys’ home in Los Angeles, the venerable maestro turned to me and said in no uncertain terms: ‘My dear, you should conduct your own music. All composers should conduct their own music!

I would say that a composer writes music to express and communicate and put down in permanent form certain thoughts, emotions and states of being. The resultant work of art should speak to the men and women of the artist’s own time with a directness and immediacy of communicative power that no previous art expression can give.

I don’t compose. I assemble materials.

A melody is not merely something you can hum.

Mozart tapped the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breathtaking rightness.

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

It’s like an act of murder; you play with intent to commit something.

The Jazz Age became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children’s party taken over by the elders.

If I’m going to sing like someone else, then I don’t need to sing at all.

In a way, I started out to be a baritone player.

If a guy is gonna to play good bop, he has to have a sort of a bop soul.

When you sing, always tell the truth.

Jazz is a spectacularly accurate model of democracy and a look into our redemptive future possibilities.

A Les Paul, which is kind of a sissy guitar compared to a Strat anyway. The Les Paul is heavier, but because of that bulk you can do bends on it more easily. Also, the Les Paul’s lack of a vibrato arm means you’re not wrestling against the spring-loaded bridge all the time. The Strat is the ultimate because it’s like having a miniature pedal steel within it. Once you get familiar with it where the bends are and where they meld down into a fourth or whatever, you can do all kinds of pedal-steel-like things, which I think are cool..

To compose music, all you need to do is remember a tune that no one else has thought of.

I always try to teach by example and not force my ideas on a young musician. One of the reasons we’re here is to be a part of this process of exchange.

If you dig it, do it. If you dig it a lot, do it again.

Of course there are a lot of ways you can treat the blues, but it will still be the blues.

They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.

The boppers flat their fifths. We consume ours.

Once I could play what I heard inside me, that’s when I was born.