Is not beauty in music too often confused with something which lets the ears lie back in an easy chair?

In 'thinking up' music I usually have some kind of a brass band with wings on it in back of my mind.

My God! What has sound got to do with music?

If a composer has a nice wife and some nice children, how can he let the children starve on his dissonances?

Please don't try to make things nice! All the wrong notes are right. Just copy as I have -- I want it that way.

The future of music may not lie entirely in music itself, but rather in the way it encourages and extends, rather than limits the aspirations and ideals of the people, in the way it makes itself a part with the finer things that humanity does and dreams of.

If idioms are more to be born than to be selected, then the things of life and human nature that a man has grown up with--(not that one man's experience is better than another's, but that it is 'his.')--may give him something better in his substance and manner than an over-long period of superimposed idiomatic education which quite likely doesn't fit his constitution. My father used to say, 'If a poet knows more about a horse than he does about heaven, he might better stick to the horse, and some day the horse may carry him into heaven'