Claude Debussy

• “Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.”

• “Some people wish above all to conform to the rules, I wish only to render what I can hear. There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law. I love music passionately. And because I love it, I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it. It is a free art gushing forth- an open-air art, boundless as the elements, the wind, the sky, the sea. It must never be shut in and become and academic art.”

Zoltán Kodály

• “Music must not be approached from its intellectual, rational side, nor should it be conveyed to the child as a system of algebraic symbols, or as a secret writing of a language with which he has no connection. The way should be paved for direct intuition.”

Sergei Prokofiev

• “In my view, the composer, just as the poet, the sculptor or the painter, is in duty bound to serve Man, the people. He must beautify life and defend it. He must be a citizen first and foremost, so that his art might consciously extol human life and lead man to a radiant future.”

• “I have never doubted the importance of melody. I like melody very much, and I consider it the most important element in music, and I labour many years on the improvement of its quality in my compositions.”

Igor Stravinsky

• “The trick is to compose what one wants to compose and to get it commissioned afterward.”

• “I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.”

• “A composer is not only an architect but also an inventor, and he should not build houses in which he cannot live.”

Maurice Ravel

• “Music, I feel, must be emotional first and intellectual second.”

• “We should always remember that sensitiveness and emotion constitute the real content of a work of art.”

Camille Saint-Saens

• “The artist who does not feel completely satisfied by elegant lines, by harmonious colors, and by a beautiful succession of chords does not understand the art of music.”

Sergei Rachmaninoff

• “The new kind of music seems to create not from the heart but from the head. Its composers think rather than feel. They have not the capacity to make their works exalt - they meditate, protest, analyze, reason, calculate and brood, but they do not exalt.”

Frederic Chopin

• “Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.”

• “I tell my piano the things I used to tell you.”

Gustav Holst

• “The Heavenly Spheres make music for us, the Holy Twelve dance with us, all things join in the dance!
  Ye who dance not, know not what we are knowing.”

Erik Satie