Musical Form Quotes

Chopin was a master of melody, harmony and voice leading - the art of smoothly moving from chord to chord.

It's not like somewhere along the way I decided to be a total formalist in terms of music and to not care about content; the content is going to be there whether I try to make it be there or not, and I can have fun and see what happens.

Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.

The inside of the tune [the bridge] is the part that makes the outside sound good.

Nobody else in the world has a form like the Native American musical, and Americans should be very proud.

The blues are like the fugue in 18th century. It's probably the music that belongs most to our time.

I start out with words, with the idea, the line. Then after I get a line or two, I try to find what melodic line those lines would be suited to. As soon as I find the form I can finish the song in my head.

Music is about textures as well as melody.

Architecture is crystallized music.

For instance, I'm always fascinated to see whether, given the kind of fairly known and established form called popular music, whether there is some magic combination that nobody has hit upon before.

The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.

Second edition of Earthworks I have the more traditional compositional approach, namely I write a piece from the piano.

I really believe musical form will go on. There's got to be a way of making musical form in cinema live again.

At its heart, music is all higher mathematics.

But the difference between the little pieces and the big pieces - I'm not actually sure which are the little pieces. With some of the big pieces, it's a lot of musical running around, whereas the little pieces, you can say everything you want to say.

The Rhapsody is not a composition at all. It's a string of separate paragraphs stuck together - with a thin paste of flour and water... I don't think there has been such an inspired melodist on this earth since Tchaikovsky... but if you want to speak of a composer, that's another matter.

To judge a composer's work, one must consider it as a whole.

The British ballads became a new kind of form in their hand. And out of them came the blues, a new kind of song of commentary and satire, a song form which, after all, has become the main musical form of the whole human species.

A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.

When I was 20, Shostakovich was my favorite composer. I still find his Fifth Symphony wonderful, with its outstanding themes and rhythms. That's the piece that made me want to be a classical composer.

I've done a lot of things to become what I've become, out to create and establish a musical form and I call it movie.

Of all composers, past and present, I am the least learned. I mean that in all seriousness, and by learning I do not mean knowledge of music.

My definition of Blues is that it's a musical form which is very disciplined and structured coupled with a state of mind, and you can have either of those things but it's the two together that make it what it is. And you need to be a student for one, and a human being for the other, but those things alone don't do it.

I started writing music as a composer in school, in the classical tradition.

Blues teaches you to develop coherent solos, because the form you're playing over is so basic. You have to develop leads that go someplace.