Toru Takemitsu famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

Although I am basically self taught, I consider Debussy my teacher - the most important elements are colour, light and shadow.
-- Toru Takemitsu

#Music #Teacher #Light
I always want to write erotic music... Not only about the love between men and women, but in a much more universal sense - about the sensuality of the mechanism of the universe... about life.
-- Toru Takemitsu

#Writing #Love Is #Men
Music should be able to invoke the natural emotions in all human beings. Music is not notes fixed on apiece of paper.
-- Toru Takemitsu

#Paper #Able #Emotion
Composition gives proper meaning to the natural streams of sound that penetrate the world.
-- Toru Takemitsu

#Giving #World #Sound
I probably belong to a type of composer of songs who keeps thinking about melody... I am old fashioned.
-- Toru Takemitsu

#Song #Thinking #Type
Music is a form of prayer.
-- Toru Takemitsu

#Prayer #Form #Music Is
The art music of the West has developed through out its history by means of individual geniuses, and out of the soil supporting them; non-Western musicians were born, and grew like the grasses of the field.
-- Toru Takemitsu

#Art #Mean #Genius
My teachers are Duke Ellington and nature.
-- Toru Takemitsu

#Inspirational #Teacher #Dukes
I am a gardener of infinite time.
-- Toru Takemitsu

#Infinite Time #Infinite #Gardener

To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.
So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning.
I was in New York, miserable because I was working supper clubs but I wasn't expressing myself. I was really unhappy with my life. I saw Max Roach again and he told me I didn't have to do things like that. He made me an honest woman on the stage. I have been performing in that tradition since. I feel that I'm a serious performer now whereas then I wanted to be but I didn't know how.
Water and air He for the Tenor chose, Earth made the Base, the Treble Fame arose, To th' active Moon a quick brisk stroke he gave, To Saturn's string a touch more sore and grave. The motions strait, and round, and swift, and slow, And short and long, were mixt and woven so, Did in such artful Figures smoothly fall, As made this decent measur'd dance of all. And this is Musick.
If the person you are talking to doesn't appear to be listening, be patient. It may simply be that he has a small piece of fluff in his ear.
It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn't use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words like "What about lunch?
My belief has come about in large measure because of the lives and examples of people I have known - not the famous, not saints, but friends and relations who have lived, and faced death, in the light of the Resurrection story, or in the quiet acceptance that they have a future after they die.
Happiness is attained, not through self-interest, but through unconditional fidelity in endless love of eternal light.
Reflection is the lamp of the heart. If it departs, the heart will have no light.
A poet is a verb that blossoms light in gardens of dawn, or sometimes midnight.

Toru Takemitsu famous quotes

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