Arthur Honegger famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

The public doesn't want new music; the main thing it demands of a composer is that he be dead.
-- Arthur Honegger

#Music #Demand #Want
To tell the truth, in Pacific 231 I was on the trail of a very abstract and quite ideal concept, by giving the impression of a mathematical acceleration of rhythm, while the movement itself slowed . Â I first called this piece Mouvement symphonique. On reflection I found that a bit colorless. Suddenly, a rather romantic image crossed my mind, and when the work was finished, I wrote the title Pacific 231, which indicates a locomotive for heavy loads and high speeds (a type unfortunately disappeared, alas, and sacrificed to electric traction).
-- Arthur Honegger

#Reflection #Giving #Mind
I have always loved locomotives passionately. For me they are living creatures and I love them as others love women or horses.
-- Arthur Honegger

#Horse #Creatures
The first requirement for a composer is to be dead.
-- Arthur Honegger

#Requirements #Firsts #Composer
The modern composer is a madman who persists in manufacturing an article which nobody wants.
-- Arthur Honegger

#Want #Modern #Composer
Composing is not a profession. It is a maniaa harmless madness.
-- Arthur Honegger

#Madness #Composing #Profession
To write music is to raise a ladder without a wall to lean it against. There is no scaffolding: the building under construction is held in balance only by the miracle of a kind of internal logic, an innate sense of proportion.
-- Arthur Honegger

#Wall #Writing #Miracle
Music is geometry in time.
-- Arthur Honegger

#Music Is #Geometry

It's fun to be creative and innovative and come up with something crazy. So I need people to work with who are not going to be afraid to take it to the left a bit.
I wanted to be different and original but still have it be something my fans could get into. There also are some big, beautiful ballads. I told my producers that I wanted tracks that are going to blow up in the clubs, but I also wanted songs that were very melodic and with a lot of instrumentation.
When I speak of the gifted listener, I am thinking of the nonmusician primarily, of the listener who intends to retain his amateur status. It is the thought of just such a listener that excites the composer in me.
I am the first instrument. I am the voice. I do not imitate other instruments. Other instruments imitate me.
Our ideology is intolerant...and peremptorily demands...the complete transformation of public life to its ideas.
God is so vastly wonderful, so utterly and completely delightful that He can, without anything other than Himself, meet and overflow the deepest demands of our total nature, mysterious and deep as that nature is.
One of the marks of a truly great mind, I had discovered, is the ability to feign stupidity on demand.
In every rebellion is to be found the metaphysical demand for unity, the impossibility of capturing it, and the construction of a substitute universe.
We cannot have peace if we are only concerned with peace. War is not an accident. It is the logical outcome of a certain way of life. If we want to attack war, we have to attack that way of life.
I want to go beyond the restrictions of language, religion and caste, and music is the only thing that allows me to do that.

Arthur Honegger famous quotes

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