Composers From England

"The distance in form, intention, mood and expression between Schubert's songs for voice and piano and those of, say, Adele is remarkably small."

"God sends meat and the devil sends cooks."

"I was with Karen Carpenter in Vegas. We were invited to Elvis's dressing room and I had to drag her away. She was such a sweet girl but I could see what was going on. I met him a few times after that, and he flirted very heavily with me. I was supposed to do a movie with him and that was stopped right away by my husband!"

"I did all my real growing up in France, which I was almost not allowed to do at home. They liked my voice, they found me sexy, they didn't know anything about my childhood. In England, you’d come on to a bright cheerful song, do a bit of comedy, finish on a big ballad and wear a sparkly dress. That was about it. Suddenly I saw people like Aznavour and Piaf, songs coming from your heart, your soul, your guts, your sex, whatever, songs about everything, life and death, love and hate, wow! I realised you can use all of you when you perform."

"I had almost no education. I hardly went to school. I’d be away for weeks doing films, then I’d come back and have no idea what they were talking about. Of course the other kids loved it: ‘You may be a well-known star but you don’t know how to do algebra.’ It was a nightmare."

"I am not really a reminiscing type person. I am not nostalgic at all."

"It was a strange life, I suppose, but it was the only one I’ve ever known. What is a normal childhood anyway?"

"Me and a book is a party. Me and a book and a cup of coffee is an orgy."

"With a note of music, one strikes the fundamental, and, in addition to the root note, other notes are generated: these are called the harmonic series...As one fundamental note contains within it other notes in the octave, two fundamentals produce a remarkable array of harmonics, and the number of possible combinations between all the notes increases phenomenally. With a triad, affairs stand a good chance of getting severely out of hand..."

"I woke at 9:57 having got to bed at 6:30 subsequent to spraying burning guitar over David Bowie's new album and not leaving the studio until 5:00."

"I used to practice scales, but I think mainly in positions. I do runs that go from position to position, basically around chord shapes. I can get around pretty easily from one position to another, and on a good night it sound pretty hot. I'll take chances. Sometimes I'll trip over myself, but most times I'm lucky."

"Normality is what we might achieve, given who we are, what we are, the conditions and limitations of the world we work within."

"We begin with the possible, and move gradually towards the impossible."

"Music is the cup which holds the wine of silence. Sound is that cup, but empty. Noise is that cup, but broken."

"A principle is universal, a rule is inflexible, a law is invariable."

"There is no such thing as making a mistake. Only one thing is compulsory, only one mistake: and that is not realizing your mistakes."

"Music so wishes to be heard that sometimes it calls on unlikely characters to give it voice, and ears. This wishing-to-be heard calls into existence the Performance Event; where music, musician and audience may come together as one, in communion. This communion has six different forms of being and experiencing itself (plus an invisible seventh); and these forms, or principles, are simultaneously present within the Performance."

"We are able to be with others only to the degree that we are able to be ourselves. This being so, we can only be in the performance to the degree that we can be ourselves: to be who we are."

"If we don’t know where we’re going, we’ll probably get there; if where we are going is how we get there, we are already where we are going."

"Act with courtesy - Otherwise, be polite, but always be kind."

"It is difficult to exaggerate the power of habit."

"Creative work is serious play."

"The musician is as rich as the music they give away."

"A mistake is always forgivable, rarely excusable, and never acceptable."

"You see, the thing is, I’ve been in jams like this. The feeling is totally there among the musicians (and whoever else happens to be sitting around, whether they’ve paid for it or not, probably, and preferably, not). You are close to silence, Silence with a capital S. You are in tune with silence, the deepest sound of them all. Every sound, therefore, that you make, make with intention, sensitivity, and awareness, has a meaning, an ineffability, a significance. You are listening, Listening with a capital L. You hear what everyone else is doing; you do whatever is necessary, which is usually as little as possible. It has nothing to do with self-expression: it has to do with a group mind."

"I, I wish you could swim Like the dolphins Like dolphins can swim Though nothing, nothing will keep us together We can beat them, forever and ever Oh, we can be heroes just for one day."

"At the party, Rob Partridge said to me, "You gave hope to other balding men." My new epitaph: "Co-wrote a couple of decent songs and went bald shamelessly.""

"Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict. Art is the rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process."

"Try to make things that can become better in other people’s minds than they were in yours."

"As struggles go, being an artist isn't that much of one."

"If you don’t call it art, you’re likely to get a better result."

"When you see people like Ken Loach, David Miller, Jackie Walker, when you see those people being accused of antisemitism, you cannot help but say this is all made up."

"The only value of ideology is to stop things becoming showbiz."

"Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable [sic] as it is interesting."

"My friend Peter Schmidt used to talk about ‘not doing the things that nobody had ever thought of not doing’, which is an inverse process – where you leave out an assumption that everybody has always made and see what happens (e.g. music has to be made of intentionally produced sounds was the assumption that Cage left out). In that version of this process, you discover a value in the absence of something ­– in fact you discover that the absence of something is the revelation of something else (Buñuel, the film-maker, said, "Every object conceals another" – a message that I often relay in the studio when overdubbing starts)."

"The reason conservatives cohere and radicals fight: everyone agrees about fears, no one about visions."

"Ideas worth questioning: "Being an artist is a job for life.""

"Saying that cultural objects have value is like saying that telephones have conversations."

"A way to make new music is to imagine looking back at the past from a future and imagine music that could have existed but didn't. Like East African free jazz, which as far as I know does not exist. To some extent, this was how ambient music emerged. My interest in making music has been to create something that does not exist that I would like to listen to, not because I wanted a job as a musician. I wanted to hear music that had not yet happened, by putting together things that suggested a new thing which did not yet exist. It's like having a ready-made formula if you are able to read it. One of the innovations of ambient music was leaving out the idea that there should be melody or words or a beat… so in a way that was music designed by leaving things out – that can be a form of innovation, knowing what to leave out. All the signs were in the air all around with ambient music in the mid 1970s, and other people were doing a similar thing. I just gave it a name. Which is exactly what it needed. A name. A name. Giving something a name can be just the same as inventing it. By naming something you create a difference. You say that this is now real."

"The Lennon-McCartney comparison was frequently made and that was an image that critics could relate to. But it wasn't something people in the street could pick up on the way they'll pick up on someone who's really good-looking."

"Music is the outward and audible signification of inward and spiritual realities."

"To whole room her eyes are numb, As she reads from a true love story. From the pages of a book her lover comes, Her heart bleeds, it's a true love story."

"Misty path and the night is endless, She could be a queen Or a desert princess. Hero takes her hand and leads her through... Who knows what this night will do? Only in the blue night he comes to her That's when the whole night Belongs to her."

"And in the deepest dark You come to a maze, in the night, The fading twilight... And you shiver the glistening path Where you know you're crazy to go..."

"Follow the light that glows Through your bedroom window, Tonight, the fading twilight. There's a hollow deep in the woods, Where you know you're crazy to go, Not even meant to know there are... Pictures in the dark, I see all around, Voices calling underground; And I'm watching the stars since the world was found... One, two, three..."

"(Take a wish!) My wish is... ...To be free, To be wild, And to be just Like a child!"

"When the birds sing outside And you see the trees Changing into green The sun invites one To be out in the open air. When the sky is so blue, then, Oh! Then I wish for so much!."

"Thro' many dangers, toils and snares, I have already come; 'tis grace has brought me Safe thus far, And grace will lead me home. The Lord has promis'd good to me, His Word my hope secures; He will my shield and portion be, As long as life endures."

"Amber light Of this new morning, Amber light, Clear, bright and warming. Overnight The Earth adorning... Amber light, A New Age is dawning...."

"You're out in the cold, Sometimes, As far as you can see, Misty. You want to run Into the sun, The road is lost, Sand shifty. But suddendly, out of the blue, Some kind of magic Pushes you through! You don't know when, How or why, But someday can take off, fly!"