Any professional knows that the flute and the piano is a boring combination. All you've got to arrive at is a kind of typical gestural crap, right? You might agree, though you wouldn't call it gestural crap

At one point [Cardew] taught himself to play guitar simply in order to take part in the performance in a composition by Boulez, which is a little like saying he learned Danish to read Kiekegaard.

To understand what music has to be, you have to live for music. Who's ready to do that?

If you think you might have secret information listening to me, you're lost.

I never understood what rules I was supposed to learn, and what rules I was supposed to break

Most music is metaphor, but Wolff is not. I am not metaphor either. Parable, maybe. Cage is sermon.

What was great about the 50s is that for one brief moment - maybe, say, six weeks - nobody understood art.