Music is essentially built upon primitive memory structures.

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

We do not hear what we hear..., only what we remember.

No one has the Houdini school of composition.

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.

For years I said if I could only find a comfortable chair I would rival Mozart.