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Charles Ives Quotes

Charles Ives Quotes.

In ‘thinking up’ music I usually have some kind of a brass band with wings on it in back of my mind.
Charles Ives
The possibilities of percussion sounds, I believe, have never been fully realized
Charles Ives
The word ‘beauty’ is as easy to use as the word ‘degenerate.’ Both come in handy when one does or does not agree with you
Charles Ives
A rare experience of a moment at daybreak, when something in nature seems to reveal all consciousness, cannot be explained at noon. Yet it is part of the day’s unity.
Charles Ives
Is not beauty in music too often confused with something which lets the ears lie back in an easy chair?
Charles Ives
Expression, to a great extent, is a matter of terms, and terms are anyone’s. The meaning of ‘God’ may have a billion interpretations if there be that many souls in the world.
Charles Ives
One thing I am certain of is that, if I have done anything good in music, it was, first, because of my father, and second, because of my wife.
Charles Ives
Every great inspiration is but an experiment.
Charles Ives
If a composer has a nice wife and some nice children, how can he let the children starve on his dissonances?
Charles Ives
There can be nothing exclusive about substantial art. It comes directly out of the heart of the experience of life and thinking about life and living life.
Charles Ives
My God! What has sound got to do with music?
Charles Ives
If a poet knows more about a horse than he does about heaven, he might better stick to the horse, and some day the horse may carry him into heaven.
Charles Ives
I don’t write music for sissy ears.
Charles Ives
A song has a few rights the same as ordinary citizens… if it happens to feel like flying where humans cannot fly… to scale mountains that are not there, who shall stop it?
Charles Ives
The future of music may not lie entirely in music itself, but rather in the way it encourages and extends, rather than limits the aspirations and ideals of the people, in the way it makes itself a part with the finer things that humanity does and dreams of.
Charles Ives
But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to hope that music may always be transcendental language in the most extravagant sense.
Charles Ives
It is more important to keep the horse going hard than to always play the exact notes.
Charles Ives
The fabric of existence weaves itself whole.
Charles Ives
Please don’t try to make things nice! All the wrong notes are right. Just copy as I have — I want it that way.
Charles Ives