You don't have to compose a masterpiece every time, but I think the challenge of art is always searching for something different, searching for a new sensitivity, a new perspective, a new vision.
I feel today, with all the possibilities we have in our hands, all the new technology at our disposal, everything is becoming obvious. Nothing is surprising. You can see beautiful things on Instagram, but there is something that doesn't touch you deeply. Everything is normal, while there's nothing that grabs you and turns you upside down.
Music is an intrinsic part of life; therefore, it is important to transport different forms of artistic expression, science, and mathematics into compositions.
There should be no boundaries in your relationship with sound. Often it's not about the music itself but the context in which you hear the music. For instance, listening to a piece of classical music in a film you love often changes your perception of it entirely.
You can learn and enrich yourself through the process of knowing a different musical culture.
Every time I start a new work, I try to be different and to start with a new perspective, so I search for a new idea, something which gives me a new way to access my creativity.
You can put the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the same category, but the types of music, the colors each band evokes, are completely different. It's the same with Mozart and Beethoven - they express two very different aspects of music.
The spirituality of the music is something that I always search for in what I do, because I think that music has to have everything inside: a strong architecture, a support, the emotion.
I like to keep changing because discovery is always interesting.
It is a boring life if you stick to all the rules.
A great melodic line is like a person's soul, and coming up with an original melody, it can be like you are illustrating the soul.
Doing the Five Tibetan Rites exercises every day - it makes me feel at home wherever I am.
In rock music, you have a big success before you turn 30, then there is sort of a decay. Then there is the reunion, and everyone is waiting to hear what you were doing when you were 20, and nobody cares what you are doing at 50 or 60. But the more I continue, the more I produce, the more I play every year in bigger places.
Arriving at a simple piece of music is a very difficult balance because, in being simple, you could easily be banal, so maybe it's more difficult to write a simple piece of music than a 12-tone piece where no one understands exactly what it is about.
The great art of the past became great because it started to go out of the perimeters that defined art and defined new territories.
The Beatles, 'Revolver.' It's pop. It's classic. It's experimental. It's revolutionary.
In '68 I was 13 years old, so I was a child, but I felt a lot of excitement in listening to things, looking at the pop art coming over from America. My father was an art collector, and he was coming home with these strange pieces of art that weren't exposed in museums. At the time, it was quite revolutionary, very adventurous.
The London Olympic Opening Ceremony was excellent. The mixture of old and new, of classic and contemporary was a beautiful reflection of Great Britain. Danny Boyle is a genius.
The creative process of composing music has always fascinated me.
I went to Mali for the first time in 2000, and I met Toumani Diabate and Ballake Sissoko - two of the greatest kora players of our time.
