42 Quotes by Lukas Foss

My students frequently ask what their next project should be. My advice: immerse yourself in the music you love and you will find what you want to do; you will discover your next project.

Boulez's only concern is with power. He lost the leadership of the avant-guard more than ten years ago to Stockhausen. Now others have moved in. With the need for power, where was he to go? So he chose to be a conductor. He is a wonderful musician, a wonderful intelligence. It's a pity there is no humanity there. Does he have sex? I think not. When men have no sex, they go after power in this big, obsessive way.

The fact that Stravinsky used the classics as a major influence is obvious. What is interesting is how he used them, how he turned Bach into Stravinsky.

To me, Mozart is our Shakespeare, the one who wrote the most dramatic, psychologically most baffling music. He combined ideas that no one else would have thought of putting together.

Truth implies meaning.

Truth is a big concept.

It is the element I miss in electronic music – no performance, no loving immersion. Maybe that is why I was never particularly drawn to electronic music.

Anybody can put things together that belong together. to put things together that don’t go together, and make it work, that takes genius like Mozart’s. Yet he is presented in the play Amadeus as a kind of silly boy whom the gods loved.

I don’t dare postulate about science, but I know that it takes both emotion and intellect in order for art to happen.