Music Theory Quotes

“Tonality is a natural force, like gravity.”

“The study of harmony is the study of the technique of composition.”

“A theme is not a melody; it is something that can be developed.”

“Ambient music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”

“Generative music is music that's always different.”

“Rock and roll is a combination of rhythm and blues and country and western. It's a happy music.”

“Polytonality is not a theory, it's a fact.”

“Tonality is not a system of rules, but a hierarchy of sensations.”

“Polyrhythms are not a problem, they're a solution.”

“If you can't manage to put tinges of Spanish in your tunes, you will never be able to get the right seasoning, I call it, for jazz.”

“Counterpoint is the art of combining melodies.”

“The creation of a classical style was not a matter of discovering a set of 'natural' laws, but of creating a new language.”

“My whole thing is to generate a system, and the system is a language and a grammar.”

“The harmonic series is a law of nature, and as such it has a certain authority for music.”

“The melody is the king of the song.”

“The idea is that two or three people, or more, can be playing at the same time, and they don't have to be in the same key.”

“Without breaks, you don't have jazz.”