What I cannot follow are the manic-depressive fluctuations from total control to no control, from the serialization of all elements to chance.

Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all. Music expresses itself.

It is the transcendent (or 'abstract' or 'self-contained') nature of music that the new so called concretism--Pop Art, eighteen-hour slices-of-reality films, musique concrete--opposes. But instead of bringing art and reality closer together, the new movement merely thins out the distinction.

The more controlled, limited and tormented art is, the freer it is.

I remember being handed a score composed by Mozart at the age of eleven. What could I say? I felt like de Kooning, who was asked to comment on a certain abstract painting, and answered in the negative. He was then told it was the work of a celebrated monkey. 'That's different. For a monkey, it's terrific'.

We have a duty towards music, namely, to invent it.

One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.