Anton Webern

"Music is natural law as related to the sense of hearing."

"Except for the violin pieces and a few of my orchestra pieces, all of my works from the Passacaglia on relate to the death of my mother."

"Webern attracts me, though there's a lot that I don't understand. His music is a combination of purity, complexity and abstraction in the very best sense of the term."

"Doomed to total failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference, he inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, of whose mines he had a perfect knowledge."

"[the impression of the first time I heard Webern's music in a concert performance] was the same as I was to experience a few years later when I first laid eyes on a Mondriaan canvas...: those things, of which I had acquired an extremely intimate knowledge, came across as crude and unfinished when seen in reality"