23+ Vijay Iyer Quotes On Violence, Travel And Creative

Vijay Iyer is an American jazz pianist, composer, and bandleader. He is widely recognized as one of the leading figures in jazz, and has been awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Grant in 2013. He has released over 20 albums and has collaborated with a wide range of artists, including Steve Coleman, Wadada Leo Smith, and many others. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Vijay Iyer on violence, love, travel.

Top 10 Vijay Iyer Quotes

1. It is one thing to be a virtuoso, but a different thing to play with compassion.
2. I make a lot of music with other desis - that's hugely important to me, but it can't be the sum total of who I am and what I do. It's not accurate; it doesn't reflect my life experience.
3. I like the idea of the objecthood of music being destabilized by process and things like improvisation. That's what empowers us; that's how we make each day new as players, as people.
4. What we call music is what reminds us of ourselves. And sometimes electronic music helps lead the imagination to a space that seems outside of ourselves. But it never really is.
5. I want to make sure that I represent a variety of backgrounds and that represents the reality out here in the world.
6. My music is always called "cerebral." It is a way of saying I'm Asian, and therefore everything I do is brainy.
7. Whatever we can do to just give people a sense of hope in the face of what seems like hopelessness. That's a small thing that an artist can do sometimes.

Vijay Iyer Famous Quotes And Sayings

Beyond that, it gets down to the nuts and bolts of discipline - not a tradition or genre, I don't care about that, actually - but discipline in the sense of just working on music and working on thinking about music. It doesn't matter if it's jazz or not. It's about how we listen, how we interact, how we guide our attention when we're listening, and how we can refine what we're doing musically. — Vijay Iyer

When I give a concert, I know they're not going to hear everything; there might be a lot going on. My individual perceptual and cognitive path through the music is just that: one path through music. My experience will be probably at some level different from other people's, and that multiplicity of experience has to be supported by the music. I might just focus on the cowbell the whole time - maybe I have a fever for more cowbell! — Vijay Iyer

Music making features real-time creation, real-time decisions and actions. It's basically improvisation, which is the stuff of everyday life. In the realm of discourse about music, improvisation is marginal, but in the realm of doing it, it's omnipresent. Strange distinction here: we're improvising all the time, but when we tend to talk about music, we tend to talk about objects that are fixed, like recordings, scores, pieces. — Vijay Iyer

If you look at my collaborations, it is very much in line with all these others in the sense that it is a building of community, particularly among artists of color. This is what I learned from the example of elder African-American artists, which is where it is all coming from; to refuse to be silenced. — Vijay Iyer

I think what music can offer is the feeling of forward motion, also the feeling of accumulation of information, of sensations, of feelings, like we're going somewhere. When I say 'feel like,' I don't mean to suggest that it's not real, but that it's the work of the imagination, which is what narrative is. — Vijay Iyer

Electronic technology has been a part of music making and music listening for a century. We always treat it like it's new, and cutting edge, but it's actually omnipresent, so we should just treat it as part of the arsenal today. — Vijay Iyer

What I've learned from my gurus is that when you hear music, you hear a person, or you hear people, and you hear everything about them in those moments. They reveal themselves in ways that cannot be revealed any other way, and it contains historical truths because of that. To me, that is the most important thing. It shouldn't be a footnote, or the last chapter. It should be the complete thesis about a book on listening. — Vijay Iyer

Lately I feel being political is also about the company I keep and the ideas I put forward. When I do a curate a program or do a workshop, I want to make it intergenerational; I want to have women on the faculty and also among the students. — Vijay Iyer

What I find the challenge is with working with, say, digital machines - performing electronic music - is that when we play instruments there's a physical act that results in a physical vibration. There's a mapping between our exertions and resultant vibrations, or resonance. — Vijay Iyer

I use are provisional terms, and they usually put any proper nouns in critical distance. I'm in a tradition of people who resist naming, fixity. That means it's a tradition of people who insist on mobility, who defy proper nouns and genres and those kinds of things. When I push back against the word 'jazz' it's because I've learned that from many, many elders who think that way. I'm not just being a jerk. — Vijay Iyer

The sense of having to be the best at everything gets in the way of anybody doing anything. I put all that aside; it's not worth thinking about when I'm there. My agenda as an artist doesn't go away when I teach. It actually gets intensified. — Vijay Iyer

We think of music as this substance that flows - you turn on the tap, and there it is, streaming off your computer - but that's not how we evolved as a species. We evolved to listen to each other, and the reason we're able to listen to music in the terms is talking about is because we're really good at listening to each other. But this kind of technology has allowed us to forget that music is the sound of each other. — Vijay Iyer

The thing about physicists is that they tend to think that everything is physics. I don't. That's not what music is to me. You can explain aspects of it in physical terms, including the physics of anatomy: how our bodies move, the torsional moment of inertia, the way you move your body to a beat, the inherent periodicities of the heartbeat, the gait. That's physics, too, I guess - maybe they'd call it biophysics. — Vijay Iyer

In the 1990s I got to play in a group that played in prisons in California. We would play in maximum security wards. It was infuriating. Those kinds of situations stick with me. We got to come in and play music for them because that's a way of caring, just offering something, a gift, basically. They're basically the most grateful audiences I've ever experienced, because nobody's giving them anything. — Vijay Iyer

With electronic music it's often a little more hidden - the relationship between gesture and sound - which makes it confounding for audiences. But the ingredients of electronic music are the same ingredients of nonelectronic music. — Vijay Iyer

My concern with this approach is that music becomes a substance devoid of people. It's a consumer model of what music is: subjects listening to objects. For me, music is subjects listening to subjects. It's about intersubjectivity. — Vijay Iyer

Life Lessons by Vijay Iyer

1. Vijay Iyer's work demonstrates the importance of experimentation and collaboration in creating innovative music.
2. His willingness to explore different genres and styles has resulted in a unique sound that has earned him acclaim and respect.
3. His career serves as an example of how dedication, hard work, and a willingness to take risks can lead to success in the music industry.