Morton Feldman Quotes

Music can imply the infinite if enough things depart from the norm far enough. Strange "abnormal" events can lead to the feeling that anything can happen, and you have a music with no boundaries.

The tragedy of music is that it begins with perfection.

The composer makes plans, music laughs.

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

Do we have anything in music that really wipes everything out? That just cleans everything away?

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

Music is essentially built upon primitive memory structures.

Compositionally I always wanted to be like Fred Astaire.

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

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

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

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

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.

I want to give my compliments to Australia. Ever since your government paid a few million dollars for a Jackson Pollack painting, I figure that it must be a marvellous country

I was once married to a woman who could eat anything and tell you what was in it: the most complicated recipes. Her memory of taste - now that's what I call memory!

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

After all, Jews invented psychiatry to help other Jews become Gentiles.

I never feel that my music is sparse or minimalist; the way fat people never really think they're fat. I certainly don't consider myself minimalist at all

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

I'm not suspicious, I'm just careful.

No one has the Houdini school of composition.

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

Boulez, who is everything I don't want art to be... Boulez, who once said in an essay that he is not interested in how a piece sounds, only how it is made.