Morton Feldman

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• "The composer makes plans, music laughs." Quoted in Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, ISBN 1878972316.

• "After all, Jews invented psychiatry to help other Jews become Gentiles." Quoted in Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, ISBN 1878972316.

• "It appears to me that the subject of music, from Machaut to Boulez, has always been its construction. Melodies of 12-tone rows just don't happen. They must be constructed....To deomnstrate any formal idea in music, whether structure or stricture, is a matter of construction, in which the methodology is the controlling metaphor of the composition...Only by 'unfixing' the elements traditionally used to construct a piece of music could the sounds exist in themselves--not as symbols, or memories which were memories of other music to begin with."
  • quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812