Composers From The United States

"We have only love, to offer as a prayer, for all the wrongs in the world. So... like singing troubadours we’ll go, singing love wherever we go."

"As friends and as musical collaborators we had traveled, toured and written — together and apart — the events of our lives as if they were songs, and I guess they were. When news of Jacques’ death came I stayed locked in my bedroom and drank for a week. That kind of self pity was something he wouldn’t have approved of, but all I could do was replay our songs (our children) and ruminate over our unfinished life together."

"We have only love, to help us find our way, as we go out into the world. So... like laughing children we’ll go singing love wherever we go."

"If we only have love Then tomorrow will dawn And the days of our years Will rise on that morn."

"Good times coming. Good times have come."

"Listening to the strains of genuine negro ragtime, brokers forget their cares."

"Syncopations are no indication of light or trashy music, and to shy bricks at "hateful ragtime" no longer passes for musical culture."

"What is scurrilously called ragtime is an invention that is here to stay. That is now conceded by all classes of musicians."

"That’s who I am. I don’t look much like him now with my foot wrapped up and all that kind of business."

"Boy, when I'm dead twenty-five years, people are going to begin to recognize me."

"Never play ragtime fast at any time."

"Panic in Wall Street, brokers feeling melancholy."

"Though we adore men individually, we agree that as a group they're rather stupid."

"Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down."

"Well, if you take a roll of film and instead of making pictures on it, you process it by pickling it in vinegar and putting it in a jar and presenting it for people to look at that way, projected through the lens of the fluid around it, this is so distorted and such a monstrous disfigurement of the normal way in which you are 'supposed to use' film, that it is a kind of pathology; it’s a sickness in the sense of a virus being inserted in the system. I think wellness and change are measured by comparison to potential for extremes of illness or death. I was trying to kill film. I wanted to let it lay over and die."

"At the start of the twenty-first century, composer Beth Anderson is one of the most exciting personalities on the American classical music scene, bucking trends of formalism and attempting to make touch with her inner self, tastes and identity in her music."

"Beth Anderson writes pretty music - the prettiest music I know of, after Schubert, Faure, Debussy, and a few long-dead white males. Her prettiness is not an intellectual deficiency, but a political stance. "To make something beautiful," Anderson likes to say, "is revolutionary." Her web page lists her as a "neo-romantic, avant-garde composer," and she may be the only composer in the world who could justify both contradictory labels. Her music has the simplicity of that of Erik Satie or, even more, Virgil Thomson. It is listenable, melodic, fun to play. Such qualities often bring her into conflict with other composers. On one 12-tone-heavy musical festival, she says, after her lullaby was performed "everyone quit speaking to me." And yet her music is no throwback to an easy past, but radical on its own terms."

"By the early 1980s, however, Anderson had moved away from text-sound music and conceptualism toward a chamber music style of great beauty, generally simple tonality, and luminous textures. She adopted a deceptively unmilitant motto—“To make something beautiful is revolutionary”... Even today, however, her chamber music betrays its twentieth-century roots in its pervasive use of collage. Her preferred form, and one she invented herself, is the swale: a term for a meadow or marsh in which a lot of plants grow together, and by extension a musical piece in which diverse musical ideas and even styles grow side by side. (The interest is curiously anticipated in a 1979 text-sound piece that runs, “Clover and daisies, alfalfa, and Queen Anne’s lace, hegemony, hodge-podge, and heliotrope... ” However, Anderson didn’t discover the word until a horse named Swale won the 1984 Kentucky Derby.)"

"To be simply a poorly paid or seldom played composer seems so tragic to me. But to be a woman composer with all the trials and tribulations that seem to go along with being a woman composer, puts everything in perspective. The struggle becomes heroic--not pitiful. The success becomes a success for all of us in the cause, not something merely egoistic."

"::j k l m n o p q r"

"::s t u v w x y z"

"I have never been able to understand women composers who do not wish to be called women composers. I understand their argument but it seems so superficial to me. Our strength lies in our identification with women and music."

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"The relationship of feminism to my work and the evolution of the form of my music are in violent flux."

"Regarding my childhood, my grandmother could play by ear and she loved to hear me practice and would say after every piece, "That was pretty. Play that one again." She was a booster. I had two women piano teachers who encouraged me to compose--Margie Murphy and Helen Lipscomb. Helen was also a composer and we used part of my lessons for composition. When I was in high school, I read John Cage's books and fell in love with the ideas and the excitement of the avant garde. My music, as a result, moved over to what has been called post-Cagian, non-academic. That lasted until about 1979 at which point I changed. My music is now quite lyrical, sometimes called neo-Romantic, and full of cut-ups/collage of newly composed materials. Since 1985 I have been composing mostly swales for various instrumental combinations. A swale is a meadow or a marsh where there is nourishment and moisture and therefore, a rich diversity of plant life. My work, since 1984, has been made from swatches (of newly composed music, rather than found music) which are reminiscent of this diversity..."

"My own mystic bent leads me to believe that musical variations, collage, reiteration and process, or evolution, are beautiful. Life is worth living and beauty is worth making."

"To make something beautiful is revolutionary (not low class, not easy, not a sign of low intelligence)."

"The idea that beauty is revolution is a revelation to me. I once believed that the concept of the music was more important than the sound, that the politics of the notation was more important than the time limits of the rehersals and therefore, more important than the sound of the performance"

"I've rediscovered the part of my brain that can't decode anything, that can't add, that can't work from a verbalized concept, that doesn't care about stylish notation, that makes melodies that have pitch and rhythm, that doesn't know anything about zen eternity and gets bored and changes, that isn't worried about being commercial or avant-garde or serial or any other little category. Beauty is enough."

"Beauty means perfect to me, but it also has an additional meaning having to do with being pleasurable, rather than painful. Beauty is hard to make. The making is painful, and involves a certain amount of craft, and a relaxation of the part of the brain that says, "Don't write that. X wrote those four notes in 1542 or 1979 or 1825 or whatever period you are worried about being influenced by.""

"Real music soars above class society."

"I used to be obsessed with this idea that odd numbers are masculine and even ones are feminine. So I wrote pieces that used even numbers, as in:"

"How blessed are they who are born deaf, and are spared the agony of listening to the hideous sounds of Symphony No. 3 by Roy Harris, just performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Roy Harris should have stuck to truck driving instead of insulting music-lovers with his senseless noise."

"If there is one jazz drummer who can truly claim to have influenced a tsunami of rock’n’roll musicians, it’s Buddy Rich. Despite surfacing from the golden age of jazz, the New York City-born drummer’s awe-inspiring solos predicted a future in which time-keepers ventured beyond the backbeat with improvisatory fills and ultra-busy drum patterns. The beauty of Rich’s playing is that he made drums the star of the show without ripping up the rhythmic roots of his brass section. Officially the only drummer to beat Animal on The Muppet Show (yes, seriously!), Rich’s sheer power and showmanship inspired the likes of Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham, Queen’s Roger Taylor and Black Sabbath’s Bill Ward, all of whom tried to emulate their hero’s mix of uncompromising ferocity and jazz-influenced professionalism. Easily one of the best drummers of any era, Buddy Rich was a legend in his own time."

"He was one of the greatest drummer to ever play the instrument. He had the probably the greatest hands ever, and played with fire and tenacity unmatched by none. Could have played double bass if he wanted, and there are pictures, but he didn't need it, he was that good! And no one f*cked with him on the bandstand!"

"I saw Buddy play live (and stood about 20 feet from him every time) about three or four times when I was very young. It was always utterly jaw dropping. I still watch and listen to him on a regular basis. His presence on the drums and his command of the instrument was second to none. I’ve always referred to him as “the Rolls Royce of drumming.""

"If you don't have ability, you wind up playing in a rock band."

"[N]ow keep your fuckin' mouth shut or I'll show you what it's like!"

"Then see what kind of a band you got up there, without all the assistance."

"Music will always be young."

"You're not my kind of people, at all."

"I'm constantly thinking melodies. Now, to add interest to those melodies, obviously you have to know what things can be superimposed over a chord, and I will think of extended arpeggios and the upper estensions. If I'm playing very vertically, I will invariably start to include certaing passing notes which imply certain scales -- like a melodic minor scale against a C minor chord, or diminished scales, something like that. But I'm not thinking of a scale at that specific moment. I'm thinking of the notes as surrounding that chord -- because I know how each of the twelve notes in music sound against a C minor seventh, for instance."

"One thing I learned a long time ago was my fretboard, in terms of all the scales in all the positions...You have to learn it - there are no two ways about it. I shift between positions so easily now that I really don't have to think about them much...I would suggest starting your scale education with the major and minor scales, and after that, diminished, augmented and whole-tone. Then depending on what kind of music you want to play, the modes should be learned. My theory about this kind of thing is that you should learn it all. Once you've learned it you can play whatever you want to play, and I think that your playing will be more advanced, and you'll have a better understanding of the instrument."

"Jingle bells, Jingle bells, Jingle all the way; Oh! what joy it is to ride In a one horse open sleigh."

"If of these United States I was the President, No man that owed another should ever pay a cent; And he who dunn'd another should be banished far away, And attention to the pretty girls is all a man should pay."

"The greatest crime of Marxism wasn't simply that much of what it claimed was false but that it claimed to be the sole and utterly complete path to understanding life and reality."

"There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than life lived inside the confines of a theory."

"Digital information is really just people in disguise."

"There is no difference between machine autonomy and the abdication of human responsibility."