Aaron Copland Quotes

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

“The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, 'Is there a meaning to music?' My answer would be, 'Yes.' And 'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?' My answer to that would be, 'No.'”

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

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, but love is the perfection of it".'Perfection”

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

“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.”

“Inspiration may be a form of super-consciousness, orperhaps of subconsciousness—I wouldn't know. But I amsure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.”

“[The modern age] knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will cluck and drop an ice cube, the automatic dishwasher will sigh through its changes, a plane will drone over, the nearest freeway will vibrate the air. Red and white lights will pass in the sky, lights will shine along highways and glance off windows. There is always a radio that can be turned to some all-night station, or a television set to turn artificial moonlight into the flickering images of the late show. We can put on a turntable whatever consolation we most respond to, Mozart or Copland or the Grateful Dead.”

“Take just one well-known event: The Beatles' 1964 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. This has been depicted with astonishing regularity as a pivotal cultural moment; in fact an entire movie -- I Wanna Hold Your Hand -- was built around it. And that Sullivan episode was indeed a major event in popular culture. But did you know that in 1961, 26 million people watched a CBS live broadcast of the first performance of a new symphony by classical composer Aaron Copland? Moreover, with all the attention that sixties rock groups receive, it may come as a surprise to learn that My Fair Lady was Columbia Records' biggest-selling album before the 1970s, beating out those of sixties icons Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and The Byrds.”