Werner

1. "..... the irony is that we can now even reach our potential and realize our original goals - to improvise and play effortlessly - once we have given up all care and concern for doing so! It is not the music we are really practicing, but the opening of the self. We are becoming vehicles for energy to flow through us."
   

2. (Effortless Mastery, Kenny Werner; Jamey Aerbersold Jazz, 1996; ISBN 1- 56224- 003-X)
   

Starker

1. "... don't sit with the cello but either look at the music and sing it to yourself or close your eyes and imagine those passages which are causing you difficulty -- so, practice in your head.
   

2. Janos Starker: A Cellist’s Memoir: NPR   (11/11/04)
   

Hall

1. ". . .In general, I try to make myself ignorant . . .when things are going right, it feels like the music is happening because you finally got out of the way".
   

2. ". . . if you have to listen to one [guitar player], study the way Freddie Green plays rhythm guitar with Count Basie's band. If you pruned the tree of jazz, [he'd] be the only person left . . ."
   

3. ". . . in the long run, I think it's more important to look at paintings than to listen to the way somebody plays bebop lines."
   

4. Excerpts from an interview with Jim Hall by Jim Ferguson ["Guitar Player" magazine; May 1983]
   

Stravinsky

1. “Invention presupposes imagination but should not be confused with it. For the act of invention implies the necessity of a lucky find and of achieving full realization of this find. What we imagine does not necessarily take on a concrete form and may remain in a state of virtuality, whereas invention is not conceivable apart from its actually being worked out. Thus, what concerns us here is not imagination in itself, but rather creative imagination: the faculty that helps us pass from the level of conception to the level of realization.”
   

Debussy

        " . . . I wish to write my musical dream with the most complete detachment from myself. I wish to sing of the inner landscape with the naive candor of childhood. 

            "Claude Achelle Debussy"  [J.G. Prod'Homme; The Musical Quarterly, 1918]