Composer Quotations | Page 2

When I opened the T-burg shop, I thought I was going into the electronic kit business, ... Then I met a composer who wanted to make electronic music on tape. We got together just for fun.

A lot of composers before me have been on this mission to change the world by getting off equal temperament, and I'm definitely one of those.

We train in the mornings, and then I go home and rest or sleep, and usually I go for a meal with Abel of a night, as we're the two with no family here, so we tend to hang around together.

My thinking in this was as follows: in all the versions I had made everything that is played serves to accompany and support the old man's voice.

My true function within a society which embraces all of us is to continue an age-old tradition. This tradition is to create images from the depths of the imagination and to give them form, whether visual, intellectual or musical.

My Mother is Swedish and my Father is Scottish, he played for Charlton in the 1960's and was in the Army, he captained the British forces team. We then moved to S.A. because a lot of players did that at the time.

I was a bit worried coming back to the Premiership from America, but I have been pleased with my form, and the interest I have received has been good for my ego. I have no worries about my fitness, and I am really looking forward to the season starting now.

I think the thing about being a film composer is that you have to be pretty eclectic-be able to turn your hand to all sorts of different styles and genres and be familiar with the latest rhythms and the range of an obscure instrument.

It may well be that some composers do not believe in God. All of them, however, believe in Bach.

It is my hope that during my brief passage through this universe, that I may share with you the joy of hearing the music of the stars... knowing that the composer was from a distant place and the songs were written eons ago, which now fall gently on this place for all to hear.

I think the hardest to replace has been Johnny Collins. He was great to play with. You could always rely on him to be available for a short pass, allowing you time to clear a ball. He would never give the ball away.

I was a purported composer with some self-taught notions about how to orchestrate for cinematic instrumentation, but no one was exactly knocking at my door. If you'd seen the apartment I was subletting at the time, you wouldn't have knocked at my door either.

You'll know if you're a famous composer if 20 years from now your name appears on a pull-down menu in Band in a Box, alongside Hans Zimmer.

We have something by every famous composer and a mother lode of American music.

Pianists call me a composer, composers call me a pianist. The classicists think me a futurist, and the futurists call me a reactionary.

The composers could no longer direct all performances in person, and so the responsibility of interpreting their works in the spirit in which they had been conceived was placed upon conductors.

Composers are not all good conductors.

There is no doubt that the first requirement for a composer is to be dead

The modern composer is a madman who persists in manufacturing an article which nobody wants.

The first requirement for a composer is to be dead.

Wherever there’s a conductor, you’re sure to find a dead composer!

When there are sequences when the eye, and not the ear, is the primary object, then the composer has his fling in the writing of incidental background music. In this branch of musical writing there have been some of the finest examples of orchestral music which our age has produced.

Music is at once the product of feeling and knowledge.

The contract I signed was just for a year, with an option for another year. If the club don't want me, or if I don't want to carry on, that's it.

The (photographic) negative is the equivalent of the composers score and the print is the equivalent of the conductors performance.

Composers are always going back to the past.

Claude Debussy was a rare phenomenon a composer profoundly and subversively revolutionary...

I am but an architectural composer.

Do you know that my very first experience as a composer was a 'Concerto for Accordion?

I always hankered to be a composer - I was mad about music, though I never studied seriously, and can't read a note. But I learned to play the piano and became pretty skillful at improvisation, especially after a drop or two.

When I was a young player, I would look at players and think, he does this well, and try and pick up good points from them, or he conducts himself well, I'll pick up on that.

I always wanted to be a spontaneous composer.

Working in television, you really need a composer who can work in many styles especially when you're working in comedy. Stockdale can do anything.

Thrilled to be honoured by the ISM and to be joining such an eminent list of members who have received the Distinguished Musician Award.

Well, American composers are the best composers. At this time in the world, we are where the energy is. We are the most diverse, the most iconoclastic, the most maverick, and the most skillful.

I began like all composers, writing for small groups. Chamber groups.

I've always been a composer dependent on texts.

As I say, this is a new secret science, to master the emptiness and turn it into something that is filled with sound and visual images.

I've come up with another formulation about style: that it's essentially a manifestation of a certain habitual set of limitations. It's what a composer does NOT do that defines a style.

The transition from one form of percussion to another and the ways in which it's possible to blur those distinctions is quite interesting.

To do two CDs worth of a very well known composer is a little different, but what isn't different is that one of the things we established when we started recording was that we were going to record things that were not as well known and that I think we've been fairly consistent about, even with famous composers.

You become what the composer asks you to become.

And with every work I have tried to expand my experience, moving sound and space, and finding new ways of superimposing different tempos and rhythms.

There is a lot of things to weigh up when a transfer happens, and money is a big factor.

Purcell is a composer who had a formative influence on British music - even The Who now cite him as an influence. There's an intense, dirty harmony, but there's a Louis XIV kind of elan and style, too. He had the melancholy DNA of our national folk heritage.

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,

Film scores are often based on short themes, and it helps if you've got some way of developing these themes and making them sometimes last 4 minutes and sometimes last 40 seconds. One ends up doing it subconsciously.

While I recognize in the back of my mind that I am an occasionally brilliant guitar composer and arranger, innovator and player.

During the course of a year I work with a lot of different Indian musicians, often in situations where I'm playing more of a classical Indian performance, ... At the same time, as a writer and composer I'm trying to figure out how to bring in some of the abstraction that exists in jazz.

Bach's music is really some of the greatest. I think, in some ways, Bach is the most profound composer of all.

Already very early I thought of a microphone as a musical instrument, like a bow or like a percussion instrument, whatever you use.

Sometimes Ive listened to film scores and felt, 'Did the composer phone that in?'

Sammy Davis, Andy Williams, Tony Bennett... their records sell in the millions; when I do it, it just trickles. But for the composer and lyricist, there's a tidy bit to be made that way, too, so I don't really mind.

Other, far fewer, directors are more like the composer - conceptualizing the piece, scoring it, distributing its musical lines among a range of registers, chords, and instruments.

I've applied to the humor commission for a license to have humor in the book. I haven't been given permission so far. I'm awaiting their verdict.

You're not limited to a song structure, as you are in pop music. For a song, you've got an intro, a chorus, a bridge, a verse, a chorus, et cetera, and you're done. This is completely open to going left or right at any point. A scoring composer isn't bound to any genre.

In many ways, a song-writing partnership is like a marriage. Apart from just liking each other, a lyricist and a composer should be able to spend long periods of time together - around the clock if need be - without getting on each other's nerves. Their goals, outlooks, and basic philosophies should be similar.

In a way, the highest praise you could give to a composer like Bach was to take and make your own arrangement; it was sort of an homage to that composer and to his work, so it wasn't considered sacrilegious to do something like that.

I've got an opinion on everything, so I should go into management.

I'm usually pretty careful about that kind of thing, but sometimes the music just pushes me into a direction that I can't really avoid following.

I'm into horror pictures because I love the fear of being alone in the dark, and I'd recommend that to any composer who wants to work in this genre.

I knew that the synthesis of sound and space music would be the most important aspect of the music of our time and of the future, since '53.

I had 10 years at Rangers and I think I'm a loyal person. I don't think I would go to another premiership club other than Everton.

I've done a lot of performance practice, Baroque playing, and some of the joy and the challenge of it is figuring out what the composer intended... You have music of the 17th century - it's all whole notes and half notes. But inside of that, there are so many things that one can do, at least according to what we know about performance practice.

The fans know their football, you can't kid them.

That's a nightmare, ... Somebody will point out to the aged widow of some composer that they heard a snatch of (his) song. It can take time.

The USA have recently done well in the Olympics and the Youth World Cup. So I think there will be some good young players available in the future, and not too expensive which is important to the club.

I hear the name Gershwin and I think of the most incredibly talented, prolific, extraordinary composer of the century, and his music is as fresh and vital today as it was when he originally created it.

If you think about the way a composer would go in a room and score, let's say, the oboe's gonna play this note, the bassoon's gonna play that note, the french horn will play that note, the resultant sound, the combination of those notes makes kind of a chord, and I'm doing the same thing with color.

In Tin 'Pan Alley, when a composer gets an idea for a song, he almost thinks of a girl he connects the song with.

I'm not an architectural composer.

I prefer to see a rough cut of the film rather than read a script. I find it difficult to get the feeling of the atmosphere of a film from a script.

I played as a 17-year-old with Walter Smith, who must have been about 32. So I've known Walter for 21 years.

The restaurant is like a theatre: we do two shows a day and when you are doing Shakespeare you don't want to throw in something out of Walt Disney.

It takes a Bobby White to make a tired 90-year-old composer write a song about love.

The greatest composer does not sit down to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working.

A good composer is slowly discovered and a bad composer is slowly found out.

A friend of mine asked me to open a sports bar in London, and the media were there. This fella started interviewing me, thinking I was Sean Bean.

As far as rock groups, I really like Stone Temple Pilots. As for classical composers, it's Bach. I love Paganini, too, the Italian composer who would break strings during a performance and finish playing on just one string. Someone I would have loved to play with is Jimi Hendrix.

Sometimes you get real close, sometimes you don't. Sometimes they drive you crazy. I think every composer does that. That's a big part of the job.

A good composer is slowly discovered a bad composer is slowly found out.

The greatest thing you can have when you compose a film score is a bit of time to think before you have to charge straight in and do it.

All the time signatures we used on Gravity were taken from folk music cultures, where those kinds of time signatures are quite normal.

The ideal, of course, is to have the respect of professionals and the admiration of amateurs. I suppose this was the case in the past.

And now even composers are proud of asking people to experience silent moments up to two or three minutes in a given piece of music.

The trombone world is starved for repertoire, that's for sure. So when a trombone concerto is commissioned from a frontline American composer for a top end orchestra, it's a big event.

Händel is the greatest and ablest of all composers; from him I can still learn.

Handel is the greatest composer that ever lived... I would uncover my head and kneel down on his tomb.

It is the power of music to carry one directly into the mental state of the composer.

I hadn’t realized that music could unlock things in you, could transport you to somewhere even the composer hadn’t predicted. It left an imprint in the air around you, as if you carried its remnants with you when you went.

It struck me as not very interesting just to take what was exactly in the film and stick it on a C.D. and put it out as a soundtrack.

It's not surprising that a composer learns in detail an instrument. That's not surprising. That should be the first thing a composer does.

As much as mixing instruments, I'm also mixing acoustic space so the music will travel through some different sorts of environments.

As a kid, I had a Beatles poster and a Bela Lugosi as Dracula poster, so both worlds always appealed to me. Horror allows you to do things as a composer than you're able to do in no other style of movie. The music has to be aggressive. You can't tiptoe around. It has to be incredibly focused dramatically - no time for second thoughts.

The more people use modern means of communication, all kinds, they call this the media, the more they are interested in the possibilities.

I attended Amherst College from 1951 to 1955. The first two years were a revelation. There were innumerable exchanges with brilliant classmates, among them the playwright Ralph Allen, the classics scholar Robert Fagles, and the composer Michael Sahl.

I can cope with a smack in the face, or at least I should be able to after the number I have had. This one was just run-of-the-mill for me.

I feel a composer should not crave to sing songs because songs itself decides its voice. The films where I have given music, I have kept my option for the last. I like to make music and not necessarily singing all the songs.

I feel a great affinity to his way of thinking. That's why I wanted to work with him. He is a composer of words and I am a composer of music, but we have a lot in common.

I certainly never thought I would be a performer or a recording artist. I think of myself as more of a songwriter than a pianist. I'm really more of a composer who plays the piano.