Avant-garde music is sort of research music. You’re glad someone’s done it but you don’t necessarily want to listen to it.

I went to see ‚Phantom of the Opera‘ with my grandma and my mom when I was very little. The stage, the voice, the music… Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber has been a massive inspiration to me for some time – the storytelling, that deliciously somber undertone in his music.

Music for me, it demands full concentration.

I like the idea of a kind of eternal music, but I didn’t want it to be eternally repetitive, either. I wanted it to be eternally changing. So I developed two ideas in that way. ‚Discreet Music‘ was like that, and ‚Music for Airports.‘ What you hear on the recordings is a little part of one of those processes working itself out.

I don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to.

What I like about pop music, and why I’m still attracted to it, is that in the end it becomes our folk music.

Agressive music can only shock you once. Afterwards its impact declines. It’s inevitable.

I could care less about the particular. I like to make music.

I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself, in a sense, in the mid 1960s really, when I first heard composers like Terry Riley, and when I first started playing with tape recorders.

Music is always a commentary on society.

Music has an intrinsic meaning, which has always been mysterious to me.

When you’re thirteen and listening to punk, the aggressive nature of music can sway you to the dark side.

I’d love it if American kids were listening to Muslim music.

Before recording technology existed, you could not separate music from its social context.

For me, great music doesn’t just have to fall into one category or one genre and I love appreciating all kinds of music.

Although cover notes for classical music albums tend to say that the trill of flutes suggests mountain streams and so on, I don’t think anybody listens to music with the expectation that they’re going to be presented with a sort of landscape painting.

I’m so happy I discovered early how wonderful music makes me feel.

I used to think that, given enough goodwill, anybody would be able to ‚get‘ any music, no matter how distant the culture from which it came. And then I heard Chinese opera.

Once I started working with generative music in the 1970s, I was flirting with ideas of making a kind of endless music – not like a record that you’d put on, which would play for a while and finish.

When I heard ‚Jesus, Take the Wheel,‘ I was like, OK. Some people look at it as a song written for an American Idol, Carrie Underwood, who is wonderful. But when you’re a songwriter listening to a song, you hear something else. I heard that song, and wow.

Prince turned experimental music into pop music. ‚When Doves Cry,‘ the whole ‚Purple Rain‘ soundtrack – he was inspired by the Cocteau Twins and new wave pop and brought it into R&B when he first started, and then it became this cool, next-level, kind of hard-to-digest music. Which is what I felt ‚House of Balloons‘ was.