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

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.

Since music has never had a Rembrandt, we have remained nothing more than musicians.

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

Art in relation to life is nothing more than a glove turned inside out. It seems to have the same shapes and contours, but it can never be used for the same purpose. Art teaches nothing about life, just as life teaches us nothing about art.

It appears to me that the subject of music, from Machaut to Boulez, has always been its construction. Melodies of 12-tone rows just don't happen. They must be constructed....To demonstrate any formal idea in music, whether structure or stricture, is a matter of construction, in which the methodology is the controlling metaphor of the composition...Only by 'unfixing' the elements traditionally used to construct a piece of music could the sounds exist in themselves--not as symbols, or memories which were memories of other music to begin with.

For me it's the instrument. If I want to think of a flute and the state of the arts I hear a vibrato; I don't know what a flute is unless the person plays it for me