"I think that's always very interesting about music. I think that throughout it's history, it's only going to have a great past. Never a future. Because you know, I remember as a kid on the New York subway, it was always good to stand at the end of the train and getting into the station at the last moment, by looking backwards. And to me that's what music is. There's something about music that's not visionary. As much as people talk about music of the future. There's something about music that always seems to come out of looking backwards." - Morton Feldman
(excerpted from an interview by Charles Shere)
(excerpted from an interview by Charles Shere)
"I wanted sounds to be a metaphor, that they could be as free as a human being might be free, (…) that they should breathe, (…) that you shouldn't know how it's made, that you shouldn't know if there's a system, that you shouldn't know anything about it."
"I am interested in getting Time into its unstructured existence. That is, I am interested in how this wild beast lives in the jungle – not in the zoo. I am interested in how Time exists before we put our paws on it – our minds, our imaginations, into it. (…) This was not how to make an object, not how this object exists by way of Time, in Time or about Time, but how this object exists as Time. Time regained. Time as an Image."
"If I can annoy you with another bon mot. Degas, you know, spent too much of his time writing sonnets. So he meets Mallarmé on the street, and Mallarmé says, "How are the sonnets going?" And Degas says, "I don't have any ideas. So Mallarmé says, "You don't write poetry with ideas. You write it with words." European you know, Mallarmé. Are there any questions?"
"If I can annoy you with another bon mot. Degas, you know, spent too much of his time writing sonnets. So he meets Mallarmé on the street, and Mallarmé says, "How are the sonnets going?" And Degas says, "I don't have any ideas. So Mallarmé says, "You don't write poetry with ideas. You write it with words." European you know, Mallarmé. Are there any questions?"
