- Why should I limit myself to only one woman when I can have as many women as I want?
- Life is a lot like jazz. It's best when you improvise.
- True music must repeat the thoughts and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.
- [after completing "Porgy and Bess"] I think the music is so marvelous, I don't believe I wrote it.
- [to George Kaufman, who had expressed severe reservations about 'Of Thee I Sing'] George, you don't like to be sentimental. You hate love, and so forth. But the people believe that the President of the United states, even though he's going to be impeached, is not going to give up the girl he loves.
- [on Jerome Kern, 1916] He was the first composer who made me conscious that popular music was of inferior quality, and that musical-comedy music was made of better material. I followed Kern's work and studied each song that he composed. I paid him the tribute of frank imitation, and many things I wrote at that time sounded as though he had written them himself.
- American popular music, since its origin, has been steadily gaining in originality. Today it may truly lay claim to being the most vital of contemporary music. Unfortunately however, most songs die at an early age and are soon completely forgotten by the selfsame public that once sang them with great gusto. The reason for this is that they are sung and played too much when they are alive, and cannot stand the strain of their very popularity. This is especially true since the invention of the phonograph, and moreso since the widespread conquest of the radio.
- Sheet music, as ordinarily printed for mass sales, is arranged with an eye for simplicity. The publishers cannot be blamed for getting out simplified versions of songs, since the majority of the purchasers of popular music are little girls with little hands, who have not progressed very far in their study of the piano.
- To play American popular music most effectively, one must guard against the natural tendency to make too frequent use of the sustaining pedal. Our study of the great romantic composers has trained us in the method of the legato, whereas our popular music asks for staccato effects, for almost a stencilled style. The rhythms of American popular music are more or less brittle; they should be made to snap, and at times to crackle. The more sharply the music is played, the more effective it sounds.
- Not many composers have ideas. Far more of them know how to use strange instruments which do not require ideas.
- Composing at the piano is not a good practice, But I started that way and it has become a habit..The actual composition must be done in the brain.
- In composing, we combine what we know of music with what we feel. I see a piece of music in the form of a design. With a melody, one can take in the whole design in one look. With a larger composition, like a concerto, it is necessary to take it piece by piece and then construct it so much longer.
- [on composing 'Rhapsody in Blue'] There had been so much chatter about the limitations of jazz, not to speak of the manifest misunderstandings of its function. Jazz, they said, had to be in strict time. It had to cling to dance rhythms. I resolved, if possible, to kill that misconception with one sturdy blow. Inspired by this aim, I set to work composing with unwonted rapidity. No set plan was in my mind - no structure to which my music would conform. The rhapsody, as you see, began as a purpose, not a plan.. I tried to conceive the composition as a whole. I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America - of our vast melting-pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our blues, our metropolitan madness.
- [on his mother] She's what the mammy writers write about, and what the mammy singers sing about. But they don't mean it, and I do
- Because 'Porgy and Bess' deals with Negro life in America, it brings to the operatic form elements that have never before appeared in opera, and I have adapted my method to utilize the drama, the humor, the superstition, the religious fervor, the dancing and the irrepressible high spirits of the race. If, in doing this, I have created a new form which combines opera with theater, this new form has come quite naturally out of the material.
- 'Porgy and Bess' is a folk tale. Its people naturally would sing folk music. When I first began work on the music I decided against the use of original folk material because I wanted the music to be all of one piece. Therefore I wrote my own spirituals and folk songs. But they are still folk music - and therefore, being in operatic form, 'Porgy and Bess' becomes an opera.
- [on 'Porgy and Bess'] Though of course I will try to keep my own style moving in the opera, the Negro flavor will be predominant throughout. I'd like to point out that Negro music is the prototype of jazz. All modern jazz is built up on the rhythms and melodic turns and twists which came directly from Africa. Even the rumba.
- The European boys have small ideas but they sure know how to dress 'em up.
- [on 'An American in Paris'] This new piece, really a rhapsodic ballet, is written very freely and is the most modern music I've yet attempted. My purpose here is to portray the impressions of an American visitor in Paris as he strolls about the city, listens to the various street noises, and absorbs the French atmosphere. As in my other orchestral compositions, I've not endeavored to present any definite scenes. The rhapsody is programmatic only in a general impressionistic way, so that the individual listener can read into the music such episodes as his imagination pictures for him.
- Most pianists with a classical training fail lamentably in the playing of our ragtime or jazz because they use the pedaling of Chopin when interpreting the blues of Handy.
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