Why composing new music ?

Various quotes : 

 

 If we compel the composer to write in terms of what the listener is able to hear, we flirt with the danger of freezing the evolution of musical language, whose progressive development comes about through transgressions of a given era's perceptual habits."

•  Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Abbate, Carolyn (translator) (1987 (original), 1990 (translation)). Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music.

 

 In order for music to free itself, it will have to pass over to the other side — there where territories tremble, where the structures collapse, where the ethoses get mixed up, where a powerful song of the earth is unleashed, the great ritornelles that transmutes all the airs it carries away and makes return.

• Gilles Deleuze, from his Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 104.

La création inédite est un acte délibéré de remise en cause de la société. Tout créateur est un provocateur. Innover, c'est contester. Celui qui raisonne toujours juste finit par se rendre insupportable aux yeux des médiocres et des hypocrites.

• Au-delà de Dieu, au-delà des chimères. Essai, Kama Sywor Kamanda, éd. L'Age d'Homme, 2007, p. 25
  
  
  Le repos du septième jour après le labeur n'enchante que Dieu : à l'homme, il ne suffit pas de « voir que cela était bon » pour goûter une détente béate. Plus exigeant que le Père Eternel, il ne se rassure qu'à créer sans relâche ; moins sage que le végétal, il veut fleurir en toute saison.

  • • Ecrits, Arthur Honegger, éd. Champion, 1992, p. 727-728 
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    Creation exists only in the unforeseen made necessary.
    •  Pierre Boulez"Éventuellement..." (1952), translated as "Possibly..." in Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 133  
    
    
    
    Music has no subject beyond the combinations of notes we hear, for music speaks not only by means of sounds, it speaks nothing but sound.
    

    • Eduard Hanslick, quoted by Wolfgang Sandberger (1996) in the liner notes to the Juilliard String Quartet's Intimate Letters. Sony Classical SK 66840.

    
    
    
    
    

    • There isn’t anything weird about my music. Weird is a skeleton in the closet, wearing a rubber mask with warts all over its nose, and all that kind of shit. That’s not what I do. The thing that makes my music unusual is that people only hear one kind of music all the time over the radio. It’s wallpaper to their lives. Audile wallpaper. There’s one acceptable beat and there are three acceptable chord progressions. There are five acceptable words: baby, love, tears, yat yat. Just because I don’t deal in those terms doesn’t mean I’m weird. So tell these people: I ain’t weird; I’m rational. I’m a person who can choose to write stuff like that, or choose to write stuff that includes all the notes on the piano played at once, followed by a cement truck driving over the piano, followed by a small atomic explosion. Nothing weird about that as long as you do it in a meaningful way. 
    • Frank Zappa

    
    
    Music, or any art form... has to strike the right balance between simplicity and complexity.
    

    • Daniel Levitin, This is Your Brain on Music (2006)