John Cage Quotes About Music

Quotes about: Music

• There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.

  John Cage

  Life, Music, Time

  John Cage (2010). “Silence: Lectures and Writings”, p.22, Wesleyan University Press

• We need not destroy the past. It is gone.

  John Cage

  Music, Past, Needs

  John Cage (2011). “Silence: Lectures and Writings, 50th Anniversary Edition”, Wesleyan University Press

• If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.

  John Cage

  Inspirational, Music, Eight

• If you develop an ear for sounds that are musical it is like developing an ego. You begin to refuse sounds that are not musical and that way cut yourself off from a good deal of experience.

  John Cage

  Music, Cutting, Ego

• Music is a means of rapid transportation.

  John Cage

  Music, Mean, Rapids

  John Cage (2010). “Silence: Lectures and Writings”, p.59, Wesleyan University Press

• Art's purpose is to sober and quiet the mind so that it is in accord with what happens.

  John Cage

  Music, Art, Mind

  "Visual Art: To Sober and Quiet the Mind". Book by John Cage, 2007.

• Let no one imagine that in owning a recording he has the music. The very practice of music is a celebration that we own nothing.

  John Cage

  Music, Practice, Singing

  John Cage (2010). “Silence: Lectures and Writings”, p.28, Wesleyan University Press

• Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.

  John Cage

  Music, Peace, Noise

  John Cage (2010). “Silence: Lectures and Writings”, p.17, Wesleyan University Press

• A 'mistake' is beside the point, for once anything happens it authentically is.

  John Cage

  Music, Mistake, Happens

  Pierre Boulez, Jean-Jacques Nattiez, John Cage, Robert Samuels (1995). “The Boulez-Cage Correspondence”, p.107, Cambridge University Press

• Percussion music is revolution. Sound and rhythm have too long been submissive to the restrictions of nineteenth century music. Today we are fighting for their emancipation. Tomorrow, with electronic music in our ears, we will hear freedom. At the present stage of revolution, a healthy lawlessness is warranted. Experiment must necessarily be carried on by hitting anything-tin pans, rice bowls, iron pipes-anything we can lay our hands on. Not only hitting, but rubbing, scraping, making sound in every possible way...What we can't do ourselves will be done by machines which we will invent.

  John Cage

  Music, Fighting, Hands

• Discord occasions a momentary distress to the ear, which remains unsatisfied, and even uneasy, until it hears something better. I am convinced...that provided the ear be at length made amends, there are few dissonances too strong for it. Disharmony, to paraphrase Bergson's statement about disorder, is simply a harmony to which many are unaccustomed.

  John Cage

  Music, Strong, Ears

• A finished work is exactly that, requires resurrection.

  John Cage

  Music, Resurrection, Finished Work

  John Cage (2010). “Silence: Lectures and Writings”, p.78, Wesleyan University Press

• If this word "music" is sacred and reserved for eighteenth and nineteenth century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound.

  John Cage

  Music, Meaningful, Organization

  John Cage (2011). “Silence: Lectures and Writings, 50th Anniversary Edition”, Wesleyan University Press

• Composing for the prepared piano is not a criticism of the instrument. I'm only being practical.

  John Cage

  Music, Piano, Criticism

• We are living in a period in which many people have changed their mind about what the use of music is or could be for them. Something that doesn't speak or talk like a human being, that doesn't know its definition in the dictionary or its theory in the schools, that expresses itself simply by the fact of its vibrations. People paying attention to vibratory activity, not in reaction to a fixed ideal performance, but each time attentively to how it happens to be this time, not necessarily two times the same. A music that transports the listener to the moment where he is.

  John Cage

  Music, School, Two

  "Autobiographical Statement". www.johncage.org. April 1990.

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