Musical Thought Quotes

My drum parts are a song within the song; that's the way I look at writing my drum parts. They follow patterns, and they're written to interact with the rest of the band. There's quite a bit of thought that goes into it.

Truth be told, I think jazz is a mind-set. It's not necessarily, like, this guy picked up a horn and did this or whatever.

I am a person who thinks about the music first in trying to achieve something musically valid.

Poetry, therefore, we will call Musical Thought.

Great thoughts ensure musical expression.

You're just sort of searching for this 'thing' and sometimes you get it and sometimes you don't. All music is imperfect, but in jazz since you're improvising, at least the way I play, I'm trying to follow my train of thought in a solo.

People fall into patterns at fast speeds, when really, to have a clear musical thought - the kind of musical thought that makes a melody work - our brains just can't think that fast. At a certain point, you're going on automatic.

The same areas which are active in listening to music are also active when you imagine music, and this includes the motor areas, too. That explains why earlier, even though I was only thinking of the mazurka, I was thinking in terms of movement.

I equate composing with orchestrating. I think my music in terms of an orchestra.

Why compose works that have to be re-created every time they are performed? Because definitive, once-and-for-all developments seem no longer appropriate to musical thought as it is today, or to the actual state that we have reached in the evolution of musical technique, which is increasingly concerned with the investigation of a relative world, a permanent 'discovering' rather like the state of 'permanent revolution'.

I kind of always thought that I had a good ear for melodies. I think in terms of melody. I can just be walking and I'll hear a melody.

I dream of instruments obedient to my thought and which with their contribution of a whole new world of unsuspected sounds, will lend themselves to the exigencies of my inner rhythm.