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• For me, the most important thing is the element of chance that is built into a live performance. The very great drawback of recorded sound is the fact that it is always the same. No matter how wonderful a recording is, I know that I couldn't live with it -- even of my own music -- with the same nuances forever.
  • Aaron Copland; quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812.

• 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; quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812

• If the listener does eventually come to the point where he makes the ultimate performance by splicing tapes from other musicians' recordings, he [sic] will eventually become just as bored with it as with other recordings, for it will still always be the same. Look, for instance, at electronic music. The boys are already becoming bored with what they do because they put it irrevocably on tape. The best indication of this is that more and more they are mixing the live performance element with their tapes.
  • Aaron Copland; quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812.

• I can't believe that people really prefer to go to the concert hall under intellectually trying, socially trying, physically trying conditions, unable to repeat something they have missed, when they can sit at home under the most comfortable and stimulating circumstances and hear it as they want to hear it. I can't imagine what would happen to literature today if one were obliged to congregate in an unpleasant hall and read novels projected on a screen.
  • Milton Babbitt; quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812

• We have all been affected as composers, as teachers, as musicians by recordings to an extent that cannot possibly be calculated as yet or predicted for the future. The music which is being most widely disseminated and most widely discussed, and therefore most widely imitated and influential, is that music which is available on records. The music that is only published is very little known. I don't think one can possibly exaggerate the extent to which the climate of music today is determined by the fact that the total Webern is available on records, that the total Schoenberg is becoming available.
  • Milton Babbitt; quoted in Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music, ISBN 0028645812