"That was my challenge as a composer. Like with anything, to keep yourself interested in doing what you do, you set yourself challenges. So I said, Okay, I'll try to write a hundred tunes in a year"
About this Quote
The neat trick is how casually he smuggles in a whole aesthetic. “To keep yourself interested” suggests that the artist’s primary relationship is not to an audience, a tradition, or even “expression,” but to attention itself. Zorn’s music has always treated style as something you can sprint through, collide with, discard, and revisit. A hundred tunes in a year isn’t just ambition; it’s a method for generating velocity, forcing surprise, and refusing preciousness. Quantity becomes a way to protect risk: if you’re writing constantly, each piece can be a test rather than a monument.
There’s also a quiet rebuke to the culture that equates seriousness with slowness. Zorn’s “Okay” lands like a shrug at institutional pacing: the grant cycle, the album rollout, the careful canon-building. He’s locating seriousness in repetition and stamina, closer to training than to muse-worship.
Context matters: coming out of New York’s downtown scene, where improvisation, genre cross-contamination, and relentless output were currencies, this isn’t just personal discipline. It’s a manifesto in plain clothes. The subtext: if you want new music, act like it’s possible to make it every day.
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APA Style (7th ed.)
Zorn, John. (n.d.). That was my challenge as a composer. Like with anything, to keep yourself interested in doing what you do, you set yourself challenges. So I said, Okay, I'll try to write a hundred tunes in a year. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/that-was-my-challenge-as-a-composer-like-with-164051/
Chicago Style
Zorn, John. "That was my challenge as a composer. Like with anything, to keep yourself interested in doing what you do, you set yourself challenges. So I said, Okay, I'll try to write a hundred tunes in a year." FixQuotes. Accessed February 1, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/that-was-my-challenge-as-a-composer-like-with-164051/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"That was my challenge as a composer. Like with anything, to keep yourself interested in doing what you do, you set yourself challenges. So I said, Okay, I'll try to write a hundred tunes in a year." FixQuotes, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/that-was-my-challenge-as-a-composer-like-with-164051/. Accessed 1 Feb. 2026.
