Charles Ives (1874-1954)
- Every great inspiration is but an experiment – though every experiment we know, is not a great inspiration.
- 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.
- It is conceivable that what is unified form to the author or composer may of necessity be formless to his audience.
- If a composer has a nice wife and some nice children, how can he let the children starve on his dissonances?
- In ‘thinking up’ music I usually have some kind of a brass band with wings on it in back of my mind.
- Vagueness is at times an indication of nearness to a perfect truth.
- You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance.
- 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.
- Awards are merely the badges of mediocrity.
- My God! What has sound got to do with music?
- I don’t write music for sissy ears.
- The possibilities of percussion sounds, I believe, have never been fully realized.
- Please don’t try to make things nice! All the wrong notes are right. Just copy as I have — I want it that way.
- 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.
- It is more important to keep the horse going hard than to always play the exact notes.
- Is not beauty in music too often confused with something which lets the ears lie back in an easy chair?
- Stand up and take your dissonance like a man.
- In some century to come, when the school children will whistle popular tunes in quarter-tones–when the diatonic scale will be as obsolete as the pentatonic is now–perhaps then these borderland experiences may be both easily expressed and readily recognized. 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.
- 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.
- An apparent confusion, if lived with long enough, may become orderly . . . 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.