“It's a young country and a German only feels comfortable being with the masses. They have very little talent at creating an inner life, privacy. And I think there must be something wrong.” ThinkingCountryTalentPrivacy Author:Martin Amis
“In a mystical sense, three can become one, in the sense that two is not one; three is a way of resolving difference between two. It's about creating balance: of energies, of dispositions. Sonic balance. That's the approach for me, what it means.” MeanEnergyBalanceMystical Author:Vijay Iyer
“In Germany, they were very interested in talking about their past. I respect that, and I think they've done quite well. It's become a kind of obsession, as it bloody well should, when compared, for example, to France, which hasn't done anything. France has done no work about their part in transporting eighty thousand people to their deaths. They are still the guy in the leather jacket with the onion, who's a part of La Résistance. In fact, they collaborated, not resisted.” PeopleThinkingKindDonePastGuyObsessionBloody Author:Martin Amis
“This is the last sentence of my dissertation: "What is soul in music if not powerfully embodied human presence?"” SoulDissertation Author:Vijay Iyer
“We can create the sensation of community through the accrual of actions, and that's often the clichéd way that storytelling is talked about, as someone taking a solo, and that's great for lots of reasons. But I don't really like to feel like I'm forced to listen to it in a certain way, or that there is one master reading of performance. I think what we want from performance is multiplicity, which is lots of ways in and through it, because it's for lots of people, and it was created by lots of people, often.” PeopleThinkingReasonActionReadingCommunityStorytellingMultiplicity Author:Vijay Iyer
“I've put live performance in a lot of spaces. Part of what I want to do is take over the takeover. Another way that someone put it is, you climb over the fence and you cut a hole in it, and let everyone else in. That's kind of what this is. The museum is a repository of great works, but there is certain work that no one ever calls great. This is an insistence on directing their attention to other stuff that's great, that never gets to be in a museum.” KindAttentionCuttingFenceGreat WorkInsistence Author:Vijay Iyer
“You figure out how to create opportunities to make music, and then, if you take care of the music, audiences will come around. They also might leave. What matters is the moment: the moment of making music, with and for and among others, and what that offers to those people in that moment. They might never see me again; they might never learn my name. But it might still be something they carry with them.” PeopleMomentsCareOpportunityAudienceTake Care Author:Vijay Iyer
“That certain snobbery of certainly the Parisian - combined with a complete denial of your historical legacy, is just awful. That's a funny thing about France. Saul Bellow wrote somewhere that he saw right through the French. He lived there. He wrote The Adventures of Augie March in Paris, and there's no one better than him to say what's unbearable about the French.” AdventureHistoricalDenialLegacyMarch Author:Martin Amis
“It doesn't matter if it's jazz or not. It's about how we listen, how we interact, how we guide our attention when we're listening, and how we can refine what we're doing musically. Also how we can create our own music, and what opportunities that can bring us, as creative musicians. And then insisting that musicians put themselves through an intellectually rigorous process, which involves a lot of reading and writing, while insisting that music scholars think about ethics.” ThinkingWritingReadingOpportunityAttentionCreativeListeningMusicianEthicsJazzScholarReading And Writing Author:Vijay Iyer
“Saul Bellow says, funny enough, what French think of your work is tremendously important. And it is. It's more than what the Italians, the Spanish, and the Germans think. Somehow it's still got that cultural primacy. I feel that too: to get praised in France is better than to get praised anywhere else.” ThinkingImportantEnoughThink Of You Author:Martin Amis