Everything we do is music." (Classical Composer)(From: 4'33")
Out of the work comes the work.
In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.
With just one musician, you can really do an unlimited number of things on the inside of the piano, if you have at your disposal an exploded keyboard.
We only hear what we listen for.
To see, one must go beyond the imiagination and for that one must stand absolutely still as though at the center of a leap.
When we separate music from life we get is art.
We are not committed to this or that. We are committed to the nothing in-between, whether we know it or not.
Ideas are one thing and what happens is another.
My favorite music is the music I haven't yet heard
What is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposeless or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life--not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.
The world is no longer a romantic place; some of its people still are however, and therein lies the promise. Don't let the world win.
Discord occasions a momentary distress to the ear, which remains unsatisfied, and even uneasy, until it hears something better. I am convinced...that provided the ear be at length made amends, there are few dissonances too strong for it. Disharmony, to paraphrase Bergson's statement about disorder, is simply a harmony to which many are unaccustomed.
Music is edifying, for from time to time it sets the soul in operation.
All God's religions ... have not been able to put mankind back together again.
When you make music you are acting as a philosopher. You can either do that consciously or you can do it unconsciously, but you're doing it.
I want to change my way of seeing, NOT my way of feeling. I was perfectly happy about my feelings.
In an utter emptiness anything can take place.
We carry our homes within us which enables us to fly.
If my work is accepted, I must move on to the point where it is not.
Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It's lighter than you think.
Where does beauty begin? Where does it end? Where it ends is where the artist begins.
Our poetry now is the realization that we possess nothing. Anything therefore is a delight (since we do not posses it) and thus need not fear its loss.
It's useless to play lullabies for those who cannot sleep.
What I'm proposing, to myself and other people, is what I often call the tourist attitude - that you act as though you've never been there before. So that you're not supposed to know anything about it. If you really get down to brass tacks, we have never been anywhere before.
The world is teeming; anything can happen.
...we make our lives by what we love.
I never had a hat, never wore one, but recently was given a brown suede duck-hunting hat. The moment I put it on I realized I was starved for a hat. I kept it warm by putting it on my head. I made plans to wear it especially when I was going to do any thinking. Somewhere in Virginia, I lost my hat.
We are involved in a life that passes understanding and our highest business is our daily life.
A sound does not view itself as thought, as ought, as needing another sound for its elucidation, as etc.; it has not time for any consideration--it is occupied with the performance of its characteristics: before it has died away it must have made perfectly exact its frequency, its loudness, its length, its overtone structure, the precise morphology of these and of itself.
We're breaking all of the rules, even our own rules, and how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.
Our intention is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of chaos, nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we're living, which is so excellent once one gets one's mind and desires out of its way and lets it act of it's own accord.
The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature, in her manner of operation.
Don't try to create and analyze at the same time. They're different processes.
I have nothing to say, and I am saying it.
You can feel an emotion; just don't think that it's so important.
Paper should be edible, nutritious. Inks used for printing or writing should have delicious flavors. Magazines or newspapers read at breakfast should be eaten for lunch. Instead of throwing one's mail in the waste-basket, it should be saved for the dinner guests.
A meal without mushrooms is like a day without rain.
Which is more musical: a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?
The Indians long ago knew that music was going on permanently and that hearing it was like looking out a window at a landscape which didn't stop when one turned away.
Good music can act as a guide to good living.
When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking. And talking about his feelings, or about his ideas of relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic - here on Sixth Avenue, for instance - I don’t have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound... I don’t need sound to talk to me.
Our business in living is to become fluent with the life we are living, and art can help this.
There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.
Now that we have everything we need, we discover that there is almost nothing that we have that we want
There will always be critics eager to fashion opinions for the lazy and incapable.
Everything I see is something I haven't memorized.
My favorite piece [piece of music] is the one we hear all the time if we are quiet.
I like being moved. I don't like being pushed.
Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school? Are the people inside the school musical and the ones outside unmusical? What if the ones inside can't hear very well, would that change my question?
If you don't have enough time to accomplish something, consider the work finished once it's begun.
Everything you do is music, and everywhere is the best seat.
There was a German philosopher who is very well known, his name was Immanuel Kant, and he said there are two things that don’t have to mean anything, one is music and the other is laughter. Don’t have to mean anything that is, in order to give us deep pleasure.
Get yourself out of whatever cage you find yourself in.
Art's purpose is to sober and quiet the mind so that it is in accord with what happens.
Try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.
My work became an exploration of non-intention.
People paying attention to vibratory activity, not in reaction to a fixed ideal performance, but each time attentively to how it happens to be this time, not necessarily two times the same. A music that transports the listener to the moment where he is.
The attitude I take is that everyday life is more interesting than forms of celebration, when we become aware of it. That when is when our intentions go down to zero. Then suddenly you notice that the world is magical.
Value judgments are destructive to our proper business, which is curiosity and awareness.
I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones.
The purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences.
I don't need sound to talk to me.
Look at everything. Don't close your eyes to the world around you. Look and become curious and interested in what there is to see.
Every something is an echo of nothing
In the nature of the use of chance operations is the belief that all answers answer all questions.
There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.
A mind that is interested in changing...is interested precisely in the things that are at extremes. I'm certainly like that. Unless we go to extremes, we won't get anywhere.
When I went to the analyst for a kind of preliminary meeting, he said, 'I'll be able to fix you so that you'll write much more music than you do now.' I said, 'Good heavens! I already write too much, it seems to me.' That promise of his put me off.
The function of Art is to imitate Nature in her manner of operation. Our understanding of her manner of operation&Rdquo; changes according to advances in the sciences.
If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.
After I had been studying with him for two years, Schoenberg said, ‘In order to write music, you must have a feeling for harmony.’ I explained to him that I had no feeling for harmony. He then said that I would always encounter an obstacle, that it would be as though I came to a wall through which I could not pass. I said, ‘In that case I will devote my life to beating my head against that wall.’
Food, one assumes, provides nourishment; but Americans eat it fully aware that small amounts of poison have been added to improve its appearance and delay its putrefaction.
Artists talk a lot about freedom. So, recalling the expression "free as a bird," Morton Feldman went to a park one day and spent some time watching our feathered friends. When he came back, he said, "You know? They're not free: they're fighting over bits of food.
To accept whatever comes, regardless of the consequences, is to be unafraid.
The white paintings came first; my silent piece came later.
When you start working, everybody is in your studio- the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas- all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave.
The world, the real is not an object. It is a process.
College: two hundred people reading the same book. An obvious mistake. Two hundred people can read two hundred books.
Nothing more than nothing can be said.
Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.
If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.
Whether I make them or not, there are always sounds to be heard and all of them are excellent.
People who aren't artists often feel that artists are inspired. But if you work at your art you don't have time to be inspired.
I was shocked at college to see one hundred of my classmates in the library all reading copies of the same book. Instead of doing as they did, I went into the stacks and read the first book written by an author whose name began with Z. I received the highest grade in the class. That convinced me that the institution was not being run correctly. I left.
It is not futile to do what we do. We wake up with energy and we do something. And we make, of course, failures and we make mistakes, but we sometimes get glimpses of what we might do next.
Art is whatever you can get away with.
The grand thing about the human mind is that it can turn its own tables and see meaninglessness as ultimate meaning.
We need not destroy the past. It is gone.
As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency.
The emotions - love, mirth, the heroic, wonder, tranquility, fear, anger, sorrow, disgust - are in the audience.
A 'mistake' is beside the point, for once anything happens it authentically is.
I remember loving sound before I ever took a music lesson. And so we make our lives by what we love.
I imagine that as contemporary music goes on changing in the way that I'm changing it what will be done is to more and more completely liberate sounds from abstract ideas about them and more and more exactly to let them be physically uniquely themselves. This means for me: knowing more and more not what I think a sound is but what it actually is in all of its acoustical details and then letting this sound exist, itself, changing in a changing sonorous environment.
The act of listening is in fact an act of composing.
An artist conscientiously moves in a direction which for some good reason he takes, putting one work in front of the other with the hope he'll arrive before death overtakes him.
What right do I have to be in the woods, if the woods are not in me.
It was at Harvard not quite forty years ago that I went into an anechoic [totally silent] chamber not expecting in that silent room to hear two sounds: one high, my nervous system in operation, one low, my blood in circulation. The reason I did not expect to hear those two sounds was that they were set into vibration without any intention on my part. That experience gave my life direction, the exploration of nonintention. No one else was doing that. I would do it for us. I did not know immediately what I was doing, nor, after all these years, have I found out much. I compose music.
Art is sort of an experimental station in which one tries out living.
The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.
Let no one imagine that in owning a recording he has the music. The very practice of music is a celebration that we own nothing.
If there are questions then, of course, there are answers, but the final answer makes the questions seem absurd.
The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing.
One shouldn't go to the woods looking for something, but rather to see what is there.
It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of 'culture.'
An error is simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality.
I believe the use of noise to make music will increase until we reach a music produced through the aid of electrical instruments which will make available for musical purposes any and all sounds that can be heard.
Theatre takes place all the time - wherever one is - and art simply facilitates persuading one this is the case.
There's no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound.
The responsibility of the artist consists in perfecting his work so that it may become attractively disinteresting.
It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.
There are some good people in it, but the orchestra as a whole is equivalent to a gang bent on destruction.
Beware of losing what isn't in your head.
Music is a means of rapid transportation.
All great art is a form of complaint
My favourite music is the music I haven't yet heard. I don't hear the music I write: I write in order to hear the music I haven't yet heard.
All I know about method is that when I am not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I am working, it is quite clear I know nothing.
Why do you not do as I do? Letting go of your thoughts as though they were the cold ashes of a long dead fire?
I certainly had no feeling for harmony, and Schoenberg thought that that would make it impossible for me to write music. He said, 'You'll come to a wall you won't be able to get through.' So I said, 'I'll beat my head against that wall.'
Not one sound fears the silence that extinguishes it. And no silence exists that is not pregnant with sound.
I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I'm doing.
I am trying to check my habits of seeing, to counter them for the sake of greater freshness. I am trying to be unfamiliar with what I'm doing.
If this word "music" is sacred and reserved for eighteenth and nineteenth century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound.
In the dark, all cats are black.
For myself and my own experience now, I don't really need any music. I have enough to listen to with just the sounds of the environment. I listen to the sounds of 6th avenue.
