Paul Horn Quotations

Music is that universal language which unifies the spirits of mankind.

It was in 1967, and I was on a spiritual pilgrimage to India to study with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. That was before the Beatles saw him, by the way, when not too many people knew of him. Anyway, I visited the Taj and noticed its wonderful sound.

Basically, I like to pick up my flute, which is a pretty instrument, and play pretty on it.

After I came out of surgery - I was in the hospital for five weeks - I found that I gravitated toward very gentle sounds: chant music, solo bamboo flute sounds, a laid-back record of my own called 'Inside.' And the music became a very real part of my recovery process.

Even back when I played 'straight-ahead,' I mixed it up. I played some free-form, classical adaptations, solo flute stuff. It was New Age in its own way.

I don't like any category; categories are not my favorite subject. They're too confining.

I'm a romantic. The impressionists have always been my favorites. I like prettiness - beauty, or what I perceive as beauty.

Jazz is a way of life, and you have to learn about it on the street, so to speak. But the training comes in by giving you the tools to work with.

New Age music does something wonderful to the nervous system.

The 'Inside' record definitely opened up a whole new audience.

The enthusiasm, the adulation for us as jazz artists, in Kiev and Odessa was really heartwarming.

We were the first small American jazz group since Sidney Bechet in 1927 to play for the public in Moscow and Leningrad.

Yes, I played inside the Taj Mahal, but the experience was also a quiet, inner experience.

You have to go out and learn jazz by playing.

It's funny to find there are still people around who think if a musician has schooling, it automatically makes him a lesser jazz player. But you don't learn jazz in school.

It's not music you can evaluate in traditional ways. If you look around at a concert, you might see what look like bored people, or maybe they're drifting, but they're just having another kind of experience, an inner thing.

We are journeying externally from country to country. We are traveling in historical time, from the present to the distant past. We are traveling inwardly as well, through the music of meditation.

We clearly need to develop a more systematic approach to services innovation if we are to sustain this vital new sector in the economy. It is critical that we work with universities to create curricula that provide students entering the workforce with skills and training needed for growing our services business.

In 1983, all of us had U.S. passports, but because there was so much tension between America and the U.S.S.R., we were announced as a Canadian group.

My feeling is, music is a more eloquent international language than Coca-Cola or McDonalds.

In the age of mediocrity and clones, John Stowell's uniqueness and originality are a breath of fresh air. I love playing with him.

Healing happens between the notes. I had to allow the space and not be afraid, and to know that things happen in space. You have to let the space settle. If you let go, you transcend and experience the stillness, and that is the healing. One ingredient of health is rest. Activity comes from inactivity. The basis of sound is silence. Stillness is basic to health.

I've approached music with the understanding that knowledge is available regarding tones and their effect upon the body. I think the father of that knowledge was the mathematician Pythagoras who lived several thousand years ago. Pythagoras was also a fine musician and he knew specifically what tones would affect which parts of the body.