People are organs of a living earth - and the cells of its body. The symphony of the cosmic concert is the music of nature - the natural "free music". If you pay attention to this art and laws of its development, everybody knows that the noises of the sea, wind, thunderstorm, makes a symphony as well as the music of birds - but right now, people exploit the music of nature according to the old laws - if they were paying more attention, they would be enlightened more - It would turn out that water, air and birds, don't sing according to our notes, but using all the notes that they find pleasure in - and with that, the laws of the natural music are observed exactly.

The creator of free music similarly to a nightingale is not limited to tones and half-tones. He also utilizes quarter-tones, eighth-tones as well as music with a free choice of tones.

- Nikolai Kulbin, "Free Music" manifesto published in Der Blaue Reiter Almanach (1910). Translated from the Russian by Ruslana Zitserman and Lonce Wyse

Music is a relationship between people, between gesture and sound, between mind and percept. Music is not contents. Of course, there have been music boxes (I mean tools that automatically produce music) for many centuries, and boxed music (I mean recorded music on carriers that is sold as a commodity) for a little more than a century.
However, we should not let our minds be framed in the little boxes.
[...]
Music is not boxed music. Music is so much a relationship that if someone knows to play any of it, he or she can earn some money in the streets of many cities in the world, which is sort of a miracle since at the same time, boxed music is forced upon us in the stores and restaurants of the same cities. Of course this miracle is possible only because and when street musicians don't pay performance rights. So what has happened around us in the past 5 years? What has happened to people, the way they access music and use it ? What has happened to people, the way they do research and use it?

- Philippe Aigrain - Society for Public Information Spaces - Keynote Speech at ISMIR 2004 - Barcelona

The electronic medium is also adding an unbelievable variety of new timbres to our musical store, but most important of all, it has freed music from the tempered system, which has prevented music from keeping pace with the other arts and with science. Composers are now able, as never before, to satisfy the dictates of that inner ear of the imagination. They are also lucky so far in not being hampered by esthetic codification - at least not yet! But I am afraid it will not be long before some musical mortician begins embalming electronic music in rules.

- Edgard Varèse, 1936

Music is an art not yet grown up; its condition is comparable to that stage of Egyptian bas-reliefs when the head and legs were shown in profile while the torso appeared "front face" - the stage of development in which the myriad irregular suggestions of nature can only be taken up in regularised or conventionalised forms. With Free Music we enter the phase of technical maturity such as that enjoyed by the Greek sculptors when all aspects and attitudes of the human body could be shown in arrested movement.

- Percy Aldridge Grainger, Dec.6, 1938

The music of the 20th century is being written by mathematicians and scientists and computer programmers. Record companies dictate what is considered to be good music. It is both an exhilarating and horrifying time for music. Where will it lead is in the next millennium?

- From