Basixcity

Since music is a language with some meaning at least for the immense majority of mankind,
although only a tiny minority of people are capable of formulating a meaning in it, and
since it is the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once
intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and
music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man, a mystery that all the various
disciplines come up against and which holds the key to their progress.

The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer
withholds or adds more or less than the listener anticipates on the basis of a pattern that
he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining. . . . If the composer
withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we
have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void. . . .
When the composer withholds less, the opposite occurs: he forces us to perform gymnastic
exercises more skillful than our own.

Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't
come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no
boundary line to art.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.
Musical people are so absurdly unreasonable. They always want one to be perfectly dumb at
the very moment when one is longing to be absolutely deaf.

There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I
don't know what it is. But I've got it.

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach
transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.