Edgard Varese Quotes
Contrary to general belief, an artist is never ahead of his time but most people are far behind theirs.
I don't want to write any more for the old Man-power instruments and am handicapped by the lack of adequate electrical instruments for which I now conceive my music.
A man is culpable in the eyes of society when he escapes from the jurisdiction of its mediocrity.
I do not write experimental music. My experimenting is done before I make the music. Afterwards it is the listener who must experiment.
A work of art must make the rules: rules do not make a work of art...I tell people I am not a musician; I work with rhythms, frequencies and intensities...tunes are merely the gossips of music.
Music, which should pulsate with life, needs new means of expression, and science alone can infuse it with youthful vigor.
I was not influenced by composers as much as by natural objects and physical phenomena.
I dream of instruments obedient to my thought and which with their contribution of a whole new world of unsuspected sounds, will lend themselves to the exigencies of my inner rhythm.
Men set themselves a goal, and having attained it, are satisfied and grow paunches. In their complacency they forget that their only future is now death.
In every domain of art, a work that corresponds to the need of its day carries a message of social and cultural value. It is the artist who crystallizes his age ... who fixes his time in history.
Music is the most abstract of the arts and also the most physical....music is under two signs, the stars and the wine
The beginning of art is not reason. It is the buried treasure of the unconscious...that unconscious which has more understanding than our lucidity.
