#musical discipline

“Work does not interrupt inspiration. Work is what inspiration looks like from the inside.”

“Every great piece of music is a set of problems solved so well that the listener never notices the problems existed.”

“A melody that costs you nothing is worth exactly that.”

“The audience hears the finished piece. The composer lived inside every wrong version of it first.”

“Originality is mostly just stubbornness applied to a very small idea.”

“You do not compose in spite of your rules. You think through them, the way water thinks through rock.”

“Silence before a note is not empty. It is the whole argument, waiting to be made.”