
“Music is everything that one listens to with the intention of listening to music.”
Two Interviews (1985), ISBN 0714528293
As quoted in Through Music to the Self : How to Appreciate and Experience Music Anew (1979) by Peter Michael Hamel, p. 18
Context: Elemental Music is never just music. It's bound up with movement, dance and speech, and so it is a form of music in which one must participate, in which one is involved not as a listener bust as a co-performer. It is pre-rational, has no over-all form, no architectonics, involves no set sequences, ostinati or minor rondo-forms. Elemental Music is earthy, natural, physical, capable of being learnt and experienced by anybody, child's play.... Elemental Music, word and movement, play, every-thing that awakens and develops the powers of the soul builds up the humus of the soul, the humus without which we face spiritual soil-erosion.... we face spiritual soil-erosion when man estranges himself from the elemental and loses his balance.
“Music is everything that one listens to with the intention of listening to music.”
Two Interviews (1985), ISBN 0714528293
“If one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.”
Algernon, Act I.
Source: The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
Context: Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.
Prokofiev’s piano sonatas : a guide for the listener and the performer (2008), Prokofiev: His Life and the Evolution of His Musical Language
"Communication", the third of the Composition as a Process lectures, John Cage gave in Darmstadt in 1958 and published in Silence.
1950s
Read from his musical diaries while speaking at St. Vladimir’s Seminary https://vimeo.com/221011528/