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To understand what music has to be, you have to live for music. Who's ready to do that?

— Morton Feldman

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Source and credibility

Wikiquote does not flag this quote as disputed or misattributed.

Source: Quoted in a 1976 interview, published in Desert Plants by Walter Zimmermann.
Source quality: Secondhand citation Quoted from another book or article rather than from the original.

More by Morton Feldman

Most music is metaphor, but Wolff is not. I am not metaphor either. Parable, maybe. Cage is sermon.

...The tragedy of music is that it begins with perfection.

After all, Jews invented psychiatry to help other Jews become Gentiles.

The composer makes plans, music laughs.

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Topics

Music

More quotes by Morton Feldman

Do we have anything in music for example that really wipes everything out? That just cleans everything away?

For years I said if I could only find a comfortable chair I would rival Mozart.

If you don't have a friend who's a painter, you're in trouble.

Sound is all our dreams of music. Noise is music's dreams of us.

Music can imply the infinite if enough things depart from the norm far enough. Strange "abnormal" events can lead to the feeling that anything can happen, and you have a music with no boundaries.

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The emphasis of study upon a particular aspect of music is in itself ideological because it contains implications about the music's value.

Lucy Green

Music is well said to be the speech of angels.

Thomas Carlyle Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1827)

Music has no subject beyond the combinations of notes we hear, for music speaks not only by means of sounds, it speaks nothing but sound.

Eduard Hanslick

Above the pitch, out of tune, and off the hinges.

François Rabelais Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Morton Feldman (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.