Top 30 Aaron Copland Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.”

— Aaron Copland

Featured in: Music Quotes, Creativity Quotes, Appreciation Quotes

2. “Music that is born complex is not inherently better or worse than music that is born simple.”

— Aaron Copland

3. “The main thing is to be satisfied with your work yourself. It’s useless to have an audience happy if you are not happy.”

— Aaron Copland

4. “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.”

— Aaron Copland

5. “You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.”

— Aaron Copland

6. “If you want to know about the Sixties, play the music of The Beatles.”

— Aaron Copland

7. “Inspiration may be a form of superconsciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness – I wouldn’t know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.”

— Aaron Copland

8. “A melody is not merely something you can hum.”

— Aaron Copland

9. “The melody is generally what the piece is all about.”

— Aaron Copland

10. “I adore extravagance but I abhor waste.”

— Aaron Copland

11. “Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes.”

— Aaron Copland

12. “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.”

— Aaron Copland

13. “You may feel depressed, but it can’t be so depressing that you can’t move. No, I would say that people create in moments when they are elated about expressing their depression!”

— Aaron Copland

14. “The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking “Is there a meaning to music?” My answer would be, “Yes”, And “Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?” My answer to that would be “No.””

— Aaron Copland

15. “There is something about music that keeps its distance even at the moment that it engulfs us. It is at the same time outside and away from us and inside and part of us. In one sense it dwarfs us, and in another we master it. We are led on and on, and yet in some strange way we never lose control.”

— Aaron Copland

16. “If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.”

— Aaron Copland

17. “Is there a meaning to music? Yes. Can you state in so many words what the meaning is? No.”

— Aaron Copland

18. “A great symphony is a man-made Mississippi down which we irresistibly flow from the instant of our leave-taking to a long forseen destination.”

— Aaron Copland

19. “I don’t compose. I assemble materials.”

— Aaron Copland

20. “Mozart tapped the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breathtaking rightness.”

— Aaron Copland

21. “The greatest moments of the human spirit may be deduced from the greatest moments in music.”

— Aaron Copland

22. “If one were asked to name one musician who came closest to composing without human flaw, I suppose general consensus would choose Johann Sebastian Bach...”

— Aaron Copland

23. “Arthur V. Berger commenting on the music of Aaron Copland: Here is at last an American that we may place unapologetically beside the great recognized creative figures of any other country.”

— Aaron Copland

24. “Most people use music as a couch; they want to be pillowed on it, relaxed and consoled for the stress of daily living. But serious music was never meant to be soporific.”

— Aaron Copland

25. “You may be sitting in a room reading this book. Imagine one note struck upon the piano. Immediately that one note is enough to change the atmosphere of the room – proving that the sound element in music is a powerful and mysterious agent, which it would be foolish to deride or belittle.”

— Aaron Copland

Featured in: Reading Quotes

26. “I hope my recordings of my own works won’t inhibit other people’s performances. The brutal fact is that one doesn’t always get the exact tempo one wants, although one improves with experience.”

— Aaron Copland

27. “Composers tend to assume that everyone loves music. Surprisingly enough, everyone doesn’t.”

— Aaron Copland

28. “Every symphony, for example, is a sonata for orchestra; every string quartet is a sonata for four strings; every concerto a sonata for a solo instrument and orchestra.”

— Aaron Copland

29. “The fearsome critic and not-very-tough composer Virgil Thomson once drew up a set of rules for hearing an unfamiliar work; the last of those is the question I take with me to every new-music event: “Is this just a good piece of clockwork, or does it actually tell time?”

— Aaron Copland

30. “As a matter of fact, no one is more tiresome than the person who can understand only realism in art. It shows a rather low artistic mentality never to believe anything you see unless it appears to be real. One must be willing to allow that symbolic things also mirror realities and sometimes provide greater esthetic pleasure than the merely realistic.”

— Aaron Copland