Pierre Schaeffer

“After the war, I was looking for a 'concrete' music, a music that would be in its raw state, a music of sounds and not of notes.”

“Sound is the vocabulary of nature.”

“Why should a composer explain his work? The work is there, and it has to speak for itself.”

“The musical object is not an instrument that you can see or a score that you can read, but a sound event that you perceive.”

“The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.”

“To listen is to lose oneself, to give oneself.”

“We have to be very critical because we live in a world that is eager to give us answers, to give us slogans, to give us ideologies.”

“Music is not limited to the pleasing sounds that music lovers adore. There is an infinity of other sounds.”

“This century has been obsessed with the idea of novelty. But novelty is not the same as originality.”

“The first gesture of an author is not to fill a blank page, but to empty it.”