Aaron Copland

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.

I hope my recordings of my own works won’t inhibit other people’s performances. The brutal fact is that one doesn’t always get the exact tempo one wants, although one improves with experience.

Mozart in his music was probably the most reasonable of the world’s great composers. It is the happy balance between flight and control, between sensibility and self-discipline, simplicity and sophistication of style that is his particular province… Mozart tapped once again the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breath-taking rightness that has never since been duplicated.

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.

Inspiration may be a form of super-consciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness—I wouldn’t know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.

When I speak of the gifted listener, I am thinking of the nonmusician primarily, of the listener who intends to retain his amateur status. It is the thought of just such a listener that excites the composer in me.

I compose my pieces with a formula that I created myself.

A drummer has to be kind-hearted.

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.

Jazz is rhythm and meaning.

So What or Kind of Blue were done in that era, the right hour, the right day. It’s over; it’s on the record.

May you live to be 100 and may the last voice you hear be mine.

I know what I’ve done for music, but don’t call me a legend. Just call me Miles Davis.

Get around, be on the scene, play it clean, be seen, be keen and be over eighteen.

If you can’t play the Blues you might as well hang it up.

Life is 10% what you make it and 90% how you take it.

Blues is a tonic for whatever ails you. I could play the blues and then not be blue anymore.

Jazz attracted me because in it I found a formal perfection and instrumental precision I admire in classical music, but which popular music doesn’t have.

I am very aware that so little has happened to the electric guitar from the time that it was conceived to now; where there are so little changes made where there should be drastic changes made. If we were to put our heads together and start thinking about modern technology we would be much more advantaged with the electric guitar than we are. I think that we’ve been stagnant for many years.

If a player is pushing their ability, a certain amount of failure is inevitable. Maybe even desirable.

In Europe they look upon jazz as art. In America it’s a diversion. Somebody opens a restaurant and installs another band off to the side. People don’t listen.