Composer Quotations

Never look at the trombones. You'll only encourage them.

I don't know whether I like it, but it is what I meant.

A composer knows that music is written by human beings for human beings and that music is a continuation of life, not something separated from it.

In India, I have been called a 'destroyer.' But that is only because they mixed my identity as a performer and as a composer. As a composer I have tried everything, even electronic music and avant-garde. But as a performer I am, believe me, getting more classical and more orthodox, jealously protecting the heritage that I have learned.

People often complain that music is too ambiguous, that what they should think when they hear it is so unclear, whereas everyone understands words. With me, it is exactly the opposite, and not only with regard to an entire speech but also with individual words.

I was not influenced by composers as much as by natural objects and physical phenomena.

The human voice is the most beautiful instrument of all, but it is the most difficult to play.

No, it's a Bb. It looks wrong and it sounds wrong, but it's right.

The modern composer builds upon the foundation of truth.

We went through this business of me writing out all the parts for these old songs from Gravity and Speechless and we'd been performing that, but we don't do that any more.

These two are not two Love has made them one Amo Ergo Sum! And by its mystery Each is no less but more.

Many composers today don't know what the human throat is.

Writing is a little athletic for me. I get worked up a little bit when I do it. So I guess I'm a little bit like that composer conducting. There are a lot of things that go into what I do, but I think athletics really sort of shaped my ethic.

If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void.

Gifted women musicians and composers rarely received their due.

You know creators, composers, need a palette for life, a color for life.

In Hollywood, the rainbow hits the ground for composers.

The music we made then was so amateurish, compared to the rest of mainstream pop or rock and roll. But what differentiated us from what everybody else was doing in the business was the fact that you could tell that these people came from different reference areas.

A lot of what a composer does has to do with storytelling, and there are different ways of fusing music with picture to express different storytelling ideas.

Chris Cutler was kind enough to offer his company as an umbrella, so now I can have all my back catalogue under one roof as it were, and it has the same feeling as with Daniel; this is a matter between friends rather than businessmen.

Any subject is good for opera if the composer feels it so intently he must sing it out.

Movie music is noise... even more painful than my sciatica.

But I'm an adventurer. I like invention, I like discovery.

Wagner is a composer who has beautiful moments but awful quarter hours.

The improvisational nature of jazz musicianship is such that a truly competent performer must be prepared to function as an on-the-spot composer who is expected to contribute to the orchestration in progress, not simply to execute the score as it is written and rehearsed.

These were all middle-class kids from literary backgrounds, joining this sort of train going by, this pop train, jumping on. Whereas the rest of the rock scene, you'll find that there's mostly working-class people.

It is conceivable that what is unified form to the author or composer may of necessity be formless to his audience.

A musicologist is a man who can read music but can't hear it.

I am writing something which I find satisfying and which I am prepared to put my name to as a composer.

It's hard to decide how to match words to music. It's not like it's twice the work. It's always difficult for me to explain to the composer what I'm looking for. I'm not a professional; I lack even basic knowledge about writing music

And when they encounter works of art which show that using new media can lead to new experiences and to new consciousness, and expand our senses, our perception, our intelligence, our sensibility, then they will become interested in this music.

Some things don't wind up sounding like you'd expect, which is just as well.

Composers are the only people who can hear good music above bad sounds.

We had literary references, so we knew what we were talking about. We could quote things, talk about books we'd read; you can say something, you don't have to explain it.

I've been kind of listening to the composer Britten and his rendition of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.' The opening track is a choral section where all the weird fairies, who are played by kids in the production, sing. It's a crazy opening melody and chord sequence - really amazing.

And so many of the kinds of labels you get stuck with don't really tell the story; Progressive, Art Rock, Noise Music, Downtown - it ends up being a struggle to stay out of debates that other people are having around you.

I am not one of the great composers. All the great have produced enormously. There is everything in their work - the best and the worst, but there is always quantity. But I have written relatively little.

Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries.

Schaeffer gave me permission to work in the studio with a technician, but I've never worked with him.

The project which we developed, however, was for a sound piece and I was initially curious that a sculptor should be interested in working with a musician, especially on a project for radio.

Brahms' Variations are better than mine, but mine were written before his.

What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.

My interest in his new toy, the Theremin, isn't very big. It simply does not fit into my way of playing music. I do not want to fiddle around with my hands in the air.

I just have to take my chances like any other composer.

Copland was the first important American classical composer to go to work for Hollywood.

Not necessarily in one concert, but they're all there to be used if you want to use them.

We consider Monteverdi the first composer of opera. There was someone before, but everything started with Monteverdi.

Im still getting used to being called a composer. A poseur, maybe.

To find a new British composer who is really good is rare.

I think the composer and production staff of an opera have a real responsibility to use visual elements of all kinds to make clear to the American audience, at any rate, exactly what is going on.

But being quiet and meditating on sound is something completely different and will be discovered very soon by a lot of people who feel that the visual world doesn't reach their soul anymore.

I've heard though that there is a younger generation of tonal French composers who are reacting with vigour.

Bernard Herrmann was a genius, a great, great composer.

For years that may mean imitation. Then, one day, it is like a door opening, and a new thought comes in. Why not try this instead. Suddenly he is doing something original, almost in spite of himself.

If I do a play, it's my vision, and everybody else is working on the production to support that. If I do an opera, I feel like part of my job is to support that composer, to try and create something that allows the composer to do his or her best work. In movies, it's usually the director.

When you're making video, you're giving structure to time, which is what a composer does.

One of the things I particularly enjoyed doing was taking raw sound from locations during the film, like the candy machine, and writing pieces of music to go with them, which is totally unnecessary within the context of the film, because they have their own logic.

I like a composer called Henry Purcell, and I love to listen to Neil Young.

Sometimes, a remix is good because it reaches a whole new generation. But when it gets too much, it's irritating. Also, the original composer needs to be credited properly.

Yes, Carl Vine stuck around. He's now number one composer for choreography.

Originally, I wanted to be a composer. I always tell people, 'I think of myself as a composer.

My dream was always to be a composer, but fashion came very easily.

Then, in 1983 I went on a very long concert tour all over Europe.

We played some gigs in Switzerland a couple of weeks ago and it was the first time I really felt the group was really a band in the sense of something I could write for.

This is something special. You can attempt to have a kind of non-living music.

Still, American composers working in France have had a pretty hard time.

It's nice to have a great female composer in the program and add her color.

In film, I was surprised when I first saw the movie 'Drive.' I said, 'Oh, God. It sounds great - I love it. Wow, this could be the soundtrack from 'American Gigolo' or 'Cat People.' But I'm surprised that the director would agree with a composer to write that kind of sound.

There are wonderful composers and librettists out there. It's the lack of creative producers that is troubling.

Most of the important composers in our country are clustered in the Northeast.

It doesn't necessarily mean at all that the composer plays his own works best.

I feel very free and very happy to be a composer.

Nobody can give a good performance unless the authors and composers have written a good part, a fact which is often overlooked.

I tend to listen to the classical composers: Rachmaninov, Satie.

I shall always respect the composer. If I embellish, it is his idea I am embellishing.

Searching for music is like searching for God. They're very similar. There's an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable, all those things, comes into being a composer and to writing music and to searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don't exist.

The further the music develops, the more complex the apparatus used by the composer to express his thoughts becomes.

To judge a composer's work, one must consider it as a whole.

My dad was a composer and a musician, but he never finished high school. His formal education was rather minimal from the standards of today's college graduates and Ph.D.'s, but he had a deep interest in questions of science and questions of the universe.

Sidney Poitier and Sidney Lumet were instrumental in helping me get started as the first black composer to get name credit for movie scores.

Music would lose its charm were not dissonance interspersed at frequent intervals. The closer a composer can come to discord without actually entering it in the score, the more pleasing will be his composition when given life through musical instruments.

I would also like the soloist to feel happy to put it in front of the public, because in the end he's on the firing line, not me.

Philips did stipulate that Julian and I had to iron out our relationship. I had to could come up with something we would both be happy with.

I have been told that a young would-be composer wrote to Mozart asking advice as to how to compose a symphony. Mozart responded that a symphony was a complex and demanding form and that it would be better to start with something simpler. The young man protested, 'But Herr Mozart, you wrote symphonies when you were younger than I am now.' And Mozart replied, 'I never asked how.'

I have greatly enjoyed my collaborations with Howard Shore, whose musical themes made immeasurable contributions to 'The Lord of the Rings' trilogy, ... During the last few weeks, Howard and I came to realize that we had differing creative aspirations for the score of 'King Kong.' Rather than waste time arguing with a friend and trying to unify our points of view, we decided amicably to let another composer score the film. I'm looking forward to working with James Newton Howard, a composer whose work I've long admired, and I thank Howard Shore, whose talent is surpassed only by his graciousness.

I did that as a personal journey when I was a philosophy student and working as a jazz musician, so I moved from philosphy to music.

The plan was that I was going to retire and take a job with the American Federation, but Nottingham Forest offered me a contract and there was interest from West Ham and another Premiership club.

Lewis Carroll's marvelous stories evoke a wondrous world and it is important that we ensure enough time for this production to achieve its fullest realization, ... We look forward to continuing to work on this new project with playwright Annie Weisman and composer Michael Friedman and to presenting it in the future.

Mozart was the first major composer who created his own career as an independent businessman, an independent entrepreneur.

Many works I have composed are only for multiple channel tapes, or for traditional instruments, solo instruments, or groups of musicians.

So, for example, I produced a layer of sounds with the syllables sung by a young boy and elements from an impulse generator with filtered noises.

Is there a meaning to music? Yes. Can you state in so many words what the meaning is? No.

The model of a composer.

I am the pianist of the duo, although Aleksey does pretty good... you know we've written more and more stuff where he has to play the piano. But you know, to be very honest, I actually went into music because I wanted to be a composer and a conductor. And piano was just one of the ways to get into that.

If a composer is to reach his audience emotionally - and surely that's what theatre music is all about - he must reach the people through sounds they can relate to.

I happen to love Saint-Saens in general. I think he's a brilliant composer and sometimes underrated in a way because people like to pass him off as fluffy and not being serious.

Certainly, he was very, very well-respected as a composer for his mastery of every genre. That is one thing that is unique about Mozart.

I felt frustrated by the limitations of rock and the lifestyle of touring around on a bus and playing the same songs over and over. So I went back to school to study music, and one of the things I got into was the Italian opera composer Puccini.

Basically I'm not a feature film composer and therefore I would probably not be able to provide scores at the level of professionalism in that field.

I have always maintained a high level of fitness, and that is why I am still able to handle the demands of playing in the Premiership. People have always commented on my fitness, and it's something I pride myself on.