Abstract Music Quotes

Naturally, underground music often gravitates toward experimentation and the abstract. That's understandable, and more often than not, it feels great to dive into a difficult album and swim a few laps.

Avant-garde music is sort of research music. You're glad someone's done it but you don't necessarily want to listen to it.

Music, uniquely among the arts, is both completely abstract and profoundly emotional.

I don't write things that are wildly abstractly atonal.

I feel like there's a lot of albums that are like 'woo! we're young, let's have fun' and there's a lot of albums that are abstract, with mature lyrics.

I'm very interested in the distance and the space between those two poles: very concrete, song-based stuff on the one hand and very improvisational, abstract stuff on the other. I don't see any reason music should exclude one or the other, and I think the pairing of them together makes for very interesting music in a lot of ways.

The abstract music is just more interesting because it doesn't really have anything to say, but if it is good, it creates thoughts and feelings, and I enjoy that. For me, once the music creates those thoughts and feelings, I begin to write a song about it.

I like the fact that music is more abstract.

As for my own music, I've never written a book about it. I'm not pedagogical... When I write an abstract piano sonata or a concerto, I write what I feel. I'm not a self-conscious composer.

Music is so abstract; it is a combination of words and melody.

Jazz musicians like John Coltrane needed these very clear titles for their abstract music, and your decision to bring voices into your music as a way to tap into content. It's related to the way my text-based work still functions as abstraction for me. If I repeat a sentence down a canvas, the text starts to smudge and disappear. It essentially becomes an abstract piece. The meaning of the text is still there.

Why is Schoenberg's Music so Hard to Understand?

It's no accident that Op. 111 attracts literary attention. Though it's music, it doesn't quite behave like it. It seems to be charged with meaning, to communicate in symbols, ciphers, clues.

When you're dealing with music without words, titles are more a means of identification than anything else. What's the point of getting lofty?

The character of instrumental music... lets the emotions radiate and shine in their own character without presuming to display them as real or imaginary representations.

My music is rather abstract and maybe even strange-sounding for some people, so maybe that's why it's been used in so many horror movies and thrillers.

I played a lot of Bach's partitas and sonatas; I like the way that Bach was abstracting already from these dance forms.

The music is the imperative. It has the upper hand. I think all music, even though it's an abstraction, does motivate a particular meaning. Then it's the job of the musician to honor that meaning and to somehow implement lyrical material that can accommodate that emotional environment.

Instrumental music is nonverbal and thus radically ambiguous. It doesn't lend itself to what might be called content-oriented analysis, though plenty of intellectuals have tried to analyze it in precisely that way.

I never learned to verbalize an abstract musical concept. No thank you. The whole point of being a serious musician is to avoid verbalization whenever you can.

Our music would probably be a really dark ocean, so you may not know where you are. It's not so literal. It's like a David Lynch movie.

There is no gender to my music. There's no male or female voice, no trite lyrics or poetry. It's much more abstract, so it lives with you longer.

I'd like to do a record that doesn't even reference actual places. Because I think it's kind of an open-ended concept. It doesn't have to be taken so literally.