John Cage Sound Quotations

I needed another basis for musical structure. This I found in sound's duration parameter, sound's only parameter which is present even when no sound is intended.

Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.

I don't need sound to talk to me,

I remember loving sound before I ever took a music lesson. And so we make our lives by what we love.

Not one sound fears the silence that extinguishes it. And no silence exists that is not pregnant with sound.

For myself and my own experience now, I don't really need any music. I have enough to listen to with just the sounds of the environment. I listen to the sounds of 6th avenue.

A sound does not view itself as thought, as ought, as needing another sound for its elucidation, as etc.; it has not time for any consideration--it is occupied with the performance of its characteristics: before it has died away it must have made perfectly exact its frequency, its loudness, its length, its overtone structure, the precise morphology of these and of itself.

There's no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound.

The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing.

Whether I make them or not, there are always sounds to be heard and all of them are excellent.