Top 23 Quotes & Sayings by Eyvind Kang

In a way, composing on the melodic level is an expression of a melodic truth, almost like a geometric truth. If it has clarity, other people will recognize it. There's no way of isolating it in a gallery on a white wall and saying, "This is a work of art. This is a mathematical proof."

I don't like to treat words and sounds like objects. You have to penetrate deeply into their meaning.

I think the question of actually relating emotion to music is totally interesting. I believe that it is really important on some level, but it's also important not to impose your own emotions on some music that has its own emotions.

I love the appropriateness of making a dogmatic statement. I support that, but that is a different level of the individual consciousness than was the source of our music.

The most appealing part is the feeling of learning something true - the pleasure of a truth. For me, that's mostly found in philosophical literature at the moment.

Even if you're a genius and you invent your own language, it doesn't become a language until there are people using it.

Listening is active. It's like vision. It's like the idea of the eye projecting light, which I've heard is what children and infants say when they're asked to explain vision - that the eye projects light, rather than just receives it.

Our individual consciousness is actually part of a larger system. There are many levels of consciousness, and the creativity used in composing the music comes from another level that is not purely personal.

I believe that music should be grown on trees, to be plucked like a fruit without the extravagance of harvest.

All these emotions are coming from one thing - sound. It's not coming from your experiences in life, your childhood. It's related to those things, but it's being triggered by the sound.

Musicians always want to sacrifice our creativity to get involved in environmental issues or political activism of some sort - to reduce it to something more populist in terms of sing-alongs or guitar songs with a message.

Working with the Latin language is pretty powerful. Working with a language that is not spoken vernacularly is intense.

Water is the most purifying element. It's always involved in baptisms, healings, that kind of work.

There is no guiding principle, because the work that is created in collaborations should be created from its own principles.

What happens in our consciousness and minds and bodies is also happening on earth. The more we pollute the earth, for example, the sicker we are.

Who approaches collaboration with agenda in terms of content? The agenda is only in terms of process, which is generosity, listening, careful thinking.

I woke up and was walking on a mountain, and I thought, "What's the worst thing that humans could do to the planet? Make it uninhabitable for humans and kill wildlife."

There is some music that's truly dark, in that it's dark in terms of hopeless. But then again, the act of hope is just making the work of art.

Learning how to listen to others and how to listen to your own thoughts is the ultimate process.

When you're listening to music, you listen to it with a friend one day and it sounds one way. You listen to it with another friend the next day, and it sounds a little different. Sometimes the greatest pleasure of listening is not the music that you're listening to; it's the person that you're listening to it with.

In a way, all recorded music is reduced to the same level, no matter what it is. You find it in the store, you put it on and, "Oh, that's not cool. That's gangsta rap. That's white supremacist punk." But in a way, the content is removed from the intention of the people that made it. That's the commercial level of music.

When you sit with people and you can hear what they're hearing, that's quite interesting.

I love the pleasure of finding the same truth in two different places. It has a lot to do with a soul.