What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.

— Ludwig van Beethoven

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“I would much rather have my piece played as a sandwich in between Haydn and Beethoven or Brahms and Stravinsky than between Mary Jane and John Doe … we’re writing music in a tradition, not the tradition, but a tradition,”

— Samuel Adler

SAMUEL ADLER: KNOWING WHAT YOU’RE DOING – New Music USA | https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/samuel-adler-knowing-what-youre-doing/

I can’t understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I’m frightened of the old ones.

— John Cage
https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/john_cage_102966

You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down… some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.

– Aaron Copland

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I was not influenced by composers as much as by natural objects and physical phenomena.

Edgard Varese

“He not busy being born is busy dying”
~Bob Dylan

But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
— William Butler Yeats

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“I must study politics and war, that my sons may study mathematics and philosophy…in order to give their children the right to study painting, poetry, music and architecture.”

– John Quincy Adams

The best music of any era lasts well, I think.
— Peter Asher

“Art is art when it is appreciated by someone.”
~ Isao Tomita

https://www.azquotes.com/author/35698-Isao_Tomita