Tonal Harmony Quotes

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

I was always playing the Hammond Organ back to front even during the days of the Nice, going back to 1968. Really what I was doing there, was choosing notes at random and trying to make some sense of them, improvising back to front.

We must have recourse to the rules of music when our genius and our ear seem to deny what we are seeking.

Music is the tonal reflection of beauty.

Eighty percent of my pieces gravitate towards an A, as a tonal thing, not at the beginning, but somewhere in it.

When I was a student, if you accidentally wrote a triad in a piece of yours, it was just sort of like you were breaking the law! You just couldn't do it. And that just meant you were a bad composer.

My music is tonally based. There is plenty of dissonance, but it's used as a contrast. There is polytonality at times and a lot of rhythmic interplay.

With the black and white films, one was concerned with tone... You had to make sure that the tone of your dress was not the same tone as the curtains, for instance.

Rachmaninov has some kind of weird dark edge to his music which I don't think I've heard with any other kind of music before.

I always liked major-key music quite a bit, and that might have something to do with so many of the musical experiences of my childhood being based around the piano.

Music, as long as it exists, will always take its departure from the major triad and return to it. The musician cannot escape it any more than the painter his primary colors or the architect his three dimensions.

For me, Debussy is the door to all 20th-century music.

Although I am basically self taught, I consider Debussy my teacher - the most important elements are colour, light and shadow.

The music is in minors.

Philosophically, I think riffs that start with E repeating itself are almost guaranteed to be great.

Playing pentatonic scales over orchestral music is not something I want to do or listen to.

I had to learn right away how to improvise behind Ornette, which not only meant following him from one key to another and recognizing the different keys, but modulating in a way that the keys flowed in and out of each other, and the new harmonies sounded right.

When using colors to recreate a general harmony of tones in nature, one loses it by painfully exact imitation. One keeps it by recreating in an equivalent color range, and that may not be exactly, or far from exactly, like the model.

As a trumpet player, I was playing Xenakis, Lindberg: very challenging, technical, atonal, and I enjoyed it.

I want to paint a canvasthat will be nothing but harmonious tone.

If you want to play it safe, mix a lot of colors in the same tone and that is such an easy way to feel modern and feel a little confident.

I practice all the scales. Everyone should know lots of scales. Actually, I feel there are only scales. What is a chord, if not the notes of a scale hooked together?

The chromatic scale is what you use to give the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema simultaneously.

As far as favorite tunes, 'You Know You Know' is one, and why it is important is difficult to say. The rhythmic cycle is very interesting and challenging to play, since it can be considered three bars of 4/4 or four bars of 3/4. 'The Dance of Maya' is another, and I have to mention 'Sanctuary.'

If you hear a C-major chord with an equal temperament, you've heard it a million times before and your brain accepts it. But if you hear a chord that you've never heard before, you're like, "huh."