Arthur Honegger Quotes

The public doesn't want new music; the main thing it demands of a composer is that he be dead.

To write music is to raise a ladder without a wall to lean it against. There is no scaffolding: the building under construction is held in balance only by the miracle of a kind of internal logic, an innate sense of proportion.

The modern composer is a madman who persists in manufacturing an article which nobody wants.

Composing is not a profession. It is a maniaa harmless madness.

To tell the truth, in Pacific 231 I was on the trail of a very abstract and quite ideal concept, by giving the impression of a mathematical acceleration of rhythm, while the movement itself slowed . I first called this piece Mouvement symphonique. On reflection I found that a bit colorless. Suddenly, a rather romantic image crossed my mind, and when the work was finished, I wrote the title Pacific 231, which indicates a locomotive for heavy loads and high speeds (a type unfortunately disappeared, alas, and sacrificed to electric traction).

The first requirement for a composer is to be dead.

I have always loved locomotives passionately. For me they are living creatures and I love them as others love women or horses.

Music is geometry in time.

I dream of a collaboration that will become so complete that, often, the poet will think as musician and the musician as poet, so that the work resulting from this union will not be the random conclusion of a series of approximations and concessions, but the harmonious synthesis of two aspects of the same thought.