Composer Quotes

Beck closes his eyes. Forgets. Zones out so far he reaches the place deep inside where his own music lies. Little notes clamouring to be free. His own notes. His own creations. His fingers tap a tattoo against his other clammy palm. If people cut him open, they'd never accuse him of being empty. He's not a shell of a pianist - he's a composer. Cut his chest and see his heart beat with a song all his own. ~ C.G. Drews

I write arrangements. I'm sort of a wannabe composer. ~ Joshua Bell

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

The art of making films is a collaborative art. As a composer, you're always working with the cinematographer because he's so much the heart of the world they've created on film. ~ Howard Shore

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

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

To talk about communication theory without communicating its real mathematical content would be like endlessly telling a man about a wonderful composer, yet never letting him hear an example of the composer's music. ~ John R. Pierce

We do not overidentify with our jobs. We may take pride in our work, we may stay late and come in on weekends, but we recognize that we are not our job descriptions. The amateur, on the other hand, overidentifies with his avocation, his artistic aspiration. He defines himself by it. He is a musician, a painter, a playwright. Resistance loves this. Resistance knows that the amateur composer will never write his symphony because he is overly invested in its success and overterrified of its failure. The amateur takes it so seriously it paralyzes him. ~ Steven Pressfield

The stories we read in books, what's presented to us as being interesting - they have very little to do with real life as it's lived today. I'm not talking about straight-up escapism, your vampires, serial killers, codes hidden in paintings, and so on. I mean so-called serious literature. A boy goes hunting with his emotionally volatile father, a bereaved woman befriends an asylum seeker, a composer with a rare neurological disorder walks around New York, thinking about the nature of art. People looking back over their lives, people having revelations, people discovering meaning. Meaning, that's the big thing. The way these books have it, you trip over a rock you'll find some hidden meaning waiting there. Everyone's constantly on the verge of some soul-shaking transformation. And it's - if you'll forgive my language - it's bullshit. Modern people live in a state of distraction. They go from one distraction to the next, and that's how they like it. They don't transform, they don't stop to smell the roses, they don't sit around recollecting long passages of their childhood - Jesus, I can hardly remember what I was doing two days ago. My point is, people aren't waiting to be restored to some ineffable moment. They're not looking for meaning. That whole idea of the novel - that's finished. ~ Paul Murray

Resistance knows that the amateur composer will never write his symphony because he is overly invested in its success and overterrified of its failure. ~ Steven Pressfield

I don't like to do things the same way every time. You always want to be evolving as a composer, and if your creative process is exactly the same each time, then how do you expect today's work to be any different from yesterday's? ~ Christopher Tin

(Golden Globe acceptance speech in the style of Jane Austen's letters):

"Four A.M. Having just returned from an evening at the Golden Spheres, which despite the inconveniences of heat, noise and overcrowding, was not without its pleasures. Thankfully, there were no dogs and no children. The gowns were middling. There was a good deal of shouting and behavior verging on the profligate, however, people were very free with their compliments and I made several new acquaintances. Miss Lindsay Doran, of Mirage, wherever that might be, who is largely responsible for my presence here, an enchanting companion about whom too much good cannot be said. Mr. Ang Lee, of foreign extraction, who most unexpectedly apppeared to understand me better than I undersand myself. Mr. James Schamus, a copiously erudite gentleman, and Miss Kate Winslet, beautiful in both countenance and spirit. Mr. Pat Doyle, a composer and a Scot, who displayed the kind of wild behavior one has lernt to expect from that race. Mr. Mark Canton, an energetic person with a ready smile who, as I understand it, owes me a vast deal of money. Miss Lisa Henson -- a lovely girl, and Mr. Gareth Wigan -- a lovely boy. I attempted to converse with Mr. Sydney Pollack, but his charms and wisdom are so generally pleasing that it proved impossible to get within ten feet of him. The room was full of interesting activitiy until eleven P.M. when it emptied rather suddenly. The lateness of the hour is due therefore not to the da ~ Emma Thompson

I go into the whole composer thing quite open to keep on going and keep on trying different things because you never know ... the next idea you have might be the one. ~ Steven Price

The ability to understand and deliver comedy and tragedy is extremely rare in one composer. ~ Signe Baumane

When you build a building, you finish a building. You don't finish a garden; you start it, and then it carries on with its life. So my analogy was really to say that we composers or some of us should think of ourselves as people who start processes rather than finish them. And there might be surprises. ~ Brian Eno

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

Most artists, most painters, even composers would want to come back and redo their work. They've got a new perspective on it, they've got more resources, they have better technology, and they can fix or finish the things that were never done. ~ George Lucas

I find respect for a mediocre British composer, as opposed to a really good American, ridiculous because they automatically respect a composer if he's from England. ~ John Corigliano

The challenge to the improvisor is to get permanence into his spontaneity. The challenge to the composer is to get spontaneity into his permanence. ~ Barry Finnerty

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

The highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist, is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. ~ John F. Kennedy

The composer does not want the self-sufficiency of a richly complex text: he or she wants to feel that the text is something in need of musical setting. ~ James Fenton

I couldn't say I ever dreamt of becoming a composer, a pianist, or anything else for that matter. I have the kind of brain where nothing is set in stone. ~ Anthony Hopkins

It's so interesting, you know, whenever you read the accounts of composers playing their own music, that they had very different priorities than performers. None of them seemed too concerned about the plastic realization of their music. ~ Helene Grimaud

I have always believed that I need a circumference of silence. As to what happens to when I composer, I really haven't the faintest idea. ~ Samuel Barber

As I get older, I'm slowing down and, yes, calming down in my desire to be taken seriously. That I can be entertaining and funny and high nervous energy can work against me as a serious composer, slowly but surely you'll see me be quieter just so that people will listen. ~ Marvin Hamlisch

The three greatest composers are Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. All the others are cretins. ~ Hans Von Bulow

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. ~ Albert Murray

After a noticeable silence, he'd recently published a book of technically baffling poems, with line breaks so arbitrary and frequent as to be useless, arrhythmic. On the page they look like some of Charles Bukowski's skinny, chatty, muttering-stuttering antiverses. Impossibly, Mark's words make music, the faraway strains of an irresistible jazz. It's plain to any reader, within a few lines - well, go read the poems and see, Marcus Ahearn traffics with the ineffable. He makes the mind of the speaker present, in that here-and-now where the reader actually reads - that place. Such a rare thing. Samuel Beckett. Jean Follain, Ionesco - the composer Billy Strayhorn. Mark calls his process "psychic improvisation" and referred me to the painter Paul Klee; the term was Klee's. "You just get out a pen and a notebook and let your mind go long," he told me. ~ Denis Johnson

A genius! For 37 years I've practised fourteen hours a day, and now they call me a genius! ~ Pablo De Sarasate

Pablo Casals is a great musician in all he does: a cellist without equal, and extraordinary conductor and composer with something to say. I have been profoundly impressed by all I have heard of his work, but he is a musician of this stature because he is also a great man. ~ Albert Schweitzer

I'll admit that writing doesn't always come, but I'm totally against walking around looking at the sky when you're experiencing a block, waiting for inspiration to strike you. Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov didn't like each other and agreed on very few things, but they were of one opinion on this: you had to write constantly. If you can't write a major work, write minor trifles. If you can't write at all, orchestrate something. ~ Dmitri Shostakovich

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. ~ John Zorn

When we work on a piece of music, we'll often read the biographies of the composer and learn about what was going on historically and artistically. But I believe that the connection to a piece of music is something much more personal and mysterious than all of these bits of information. ~ Helene Grimaud

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. ~ Anthony Newley

I sometimes think that the most plaintive ditty has brought a fuller joy and of longer duration to its composer that the conquest of Persia to the Macedonian. ~ Walter Savage Landor

At the same time, one of the things I noticed was that the moment there was any kind of audio attached to virtual reality, it really improved the experience, even though the audio didn't feel like a sound engineer or composer had been anywhere near it. ~ Thomas Dolby

When I'm creating at the piano, I tend to feel happy; but - the eternal dilemma - how can we be happy amid the unhappiness of others? I'd do everything I could to give everyone a moment of happiness. That's what's at the heart of my music. ~ Nino Rota

Well, let me, first of all, say, that as a microtonal composer, I've never been much of a theorist. ~ John Eaton

I'm still getting used to being called a composer. A poseur, maybe. ~ Dhani Harrison

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. ~ Ravi Shankar

In order to understand how engineers endeavor to insure against such structural, mechanical, and systems failures, and thereby also to understand how mistakes can be made and accidents with far-reaching consequences can occur, it is necessary to understand, at least partly, the nature of engineering design. It is the process of design, in which diverse parts of the 'given-world' of the scientist and the 'made-world' of the engineer are reformed and assembled into something the likes of which Nature had not dreamed, that divorces engineering from science and marries it to art. While the practice of engineering may involve as much technical experience as the poet brings to the blank page, the painter to the empty canvas, or the composer to the silent keyboard, the understanding and appreciation of the process and products of engineering are no less accessible than a poem, a painting, or a piece of music. Indeed, just as we all have experienced the rudiments of artistic creativity in the childhood masterpieces our parents were so proud of, so we have all experienced the essence of structual engineering in our learning to balance first our bodies and later our blocks in ever more ambitious positions. We have learned to endure the most boring of cocktail parties without the social accident of either our bodies or our glasses succumbing to the force of gravity, having long ago learned to crawl, sit up, and toddle among our tottering towers of blocks. If we could remember those earl ~ Henry Petroski

A composer is not only an architect but also an inventor, and he should not build houses in which he cannot live. ~ Igor Stravinsky

There are, however, composers whose music can only be heard in a chromatic sense. George Perle, for example, wrote pieces that you might think of as leaning in a tonal direction but it's very hard to register a pitch as, say, the sixth degree of a scale, whereas in much of my music I think that's often relatively easy to do. ~ Paul Lansky

There are some composers - at the head of whom stands Beethoven - who not only do not know when to stop but appear to stop many times before they actually do. ~ Virginia Graham

One important thing, just being a film composer in general, is to have a great respect for the art that you're working on - a great respect for the film and a great respect for the filmmakers. ~ Joseph Trapanese

A person taking stock in middle age is like an artist or composer looking at an unfinished work; but whereas the composer and the painter can erase some of their past efforts, we cannot. We are stuck with what we have lived through. The trick is to finish it with a sense of design and a flourish rather than to patch up the holes or merely to add new patches to it. ~ Harry S. Broudy

Songs give you incredible opportunity to convey a tremendous amount in a relatively short period of time. The first thing that John Powell, our composer, says is, "Is the song engaging you to tap your toe?" If you're not tapping your toe, it doesn't matter what you're doing in the song, it's not going to work. But, if you can get the audience to be engaged by the song, then it gives you the opportunity to accomplish so much, in a very concise way. ~ Christopher Meledandri

You do not play a sonata in order to reach the final chord, and if the meanings of things were simply in ends, composers would write nothing but finales. ~ Alan W. Watts

The Prince stood beside the timpanist to count his rests for him and see that he came in in the right place. I suppressed all the trumpet passages which were clearly beyond the players' grasp. The solitary trombone was left to his own devices; but as he wisely confined himself to the notes with which he was thoroughly familiar, such as A flat, D and F, and was careful to avoid all others, his success in the role was almost entirely a silent one. ~ Hector Berlioz

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. ~ Sonu Nigam

Since the beginning of time, children have not liked to study. They would much rather play, and if you have their interests at heart, you will let them learn while they play; they will find that what they have mastered is child's play. ~ Carl Orff

As they walked out onto Second Avenue, with David in a body bag, there was one last surreal moment. The singer and composer Diamanda Galás happened to be walking by. She and David had never met, but they'd spoken once on the phone. She shared his commitment to addressing AIDS, in her case through 'The Plague Mass,' which showcased her five-octave range and fierce persona.
Galás does not remember being on Second Avenue that night, but she made an indelible impression on Zimmerman and Glantzman.
She had walked by, but as they were putting David into the hearse, she spun around and ran back, yelling, 'Who is that? Is that David Wojnarowicz?' Zimmerman and Brown didn't answer. What Glantzman remembers is that Diamanda Galás was there at the door, screaming. 'As if our feelings were amplified,' said Glantzman. 'Hysterical screaming. ~ Cynthia Carr

The essential conditions of everything you do must be choice, love, passion. ~ Nadia Boulanger

Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend. ~ Ludwig Van Beethoven

If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music. ~ Gustav Mahler

Every philharmonic orchestra merely interprets the composer. My goal was to create new music by that composer. In doing so, I wanted to find the painter's creative center and become familiar with it, so that I could see through his eyes how his paintings came about and, of course, see the new picture I was painting through his eyes - before I even painted it. ~ Wolfgang Beltracchi

Composers need words, but they do not necessarily need poetry. The Russian composer, Aleksandr Mossolov, who chose texts from newspaper small ads, had a good point to make. With revolutionary music, any text can be set to work. ~ James Fenton

And if I ever DO see [Kenny G] anywhere, at any function - he WILL get a piece of my mind, and maybe a guitar wrapped around his head. ~ Pat Metheny

If there is anyone here whom I have not insulted, I beg his pardon. ~ Johannes Brahms

I was offered a few shows, but the money didn't work out, but I'm not very keen on judging such shows. I'm happy in my space as a composer. ~ Pritam Chakraborty

Composer" is a word which here means "a person who sits in a room, muttering and humming and figuring out what notes the orchestra is going to play." This is called composing. But last night, the Composer was not muttering. He was not humming. He was not moving, or even breathing.
This is called decomposing. ~ Lemony Snicket

On his youth, Yoshiro had prided himself of always having an answer ready when someone asked who his favorite composer or designer was, or what kind of wine he preferred. Confident in his good taste, he had poured time and money into surrounding himself with things that would show it off. Now he no longer felt any need to use taste as the bricks and mortar fora structure called «individuality». ~ Yōko Tawada

In any case, once you're dealing on a nonverbal level, ambiguity is unavoidable. But it's the ambiguity of all art, of a fine piece of music or a painting - you don't need written instructions by the composer or painter accompanying such works to 'explain' them. "Explaining" them contributes nothing but a superficial 'cultural' value which has no value except for critics and teachers who have to earn a living. ~ Stanley Kubrick

The fact that certain composers have been able to create first-class music within the medium of film proves that film music can be as good as the composer is gifted. ~ Jerry Goldsmith

Perhaps the chief requirement of [the conductor] is that he be humble before the composer; that he never interpose himself between the music and the audience; that all his efforts, however strenuous or glamorous, be made in the service of the composer's meaning - the music itself, which, after all, is the whole reason for the conductor's existence. ~ Leonard Bernstein

There are no woman composers, never have been and possibly never will be. ~ Thomas Beecham

If you're the sort of person that likes a job where once you know what you're doing you can keep doing what you're doing, don't ever become a film composer. ~ Henry Jackman

Jerry Goldsmith is an artist who meets all the demands upon the composer in films. He communicates, integrates, subordinates, supports, and designs with discipline. ~ Jerry Goldsmith

Ifukube's music was rarely tampered with or shortened by Honda after it had been recorded and the director gave his composer total freedom in writing whatever music he deemed appropriate. ~ Peter H. Brothers

I think a lot of people get intimidated by the language of music, but everyone owns music. I think there's nothing standing in between a composer and her audience. I think a lot of people feel that way because they feel it's rarefied, but it's really not. You should feel the impact of it without being able to name it because it's ultimately a primal thing. ~ Jeanine Tesori

I'm a revolutionary, money means nothing to me. ~ Frederic Chopin

John Barry was the first film composer I was aware of. As a teenager I owned several of his Bond soundtracks. ~ Carter Burwell

The fearsome critic and not-very-tough composer Virgil Thomson once drew up a set of rules for hearing an unfamiliar work; the last of those is the question I take with me to every new-music event: "Is this just a good piece of clockwork, or does it actually tell time? ~ Aaron Copland

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

What inspires me is not so much the music as the opportunity to interact with composers. I think that has driven everything I've done. ~ Robert Moog

That is basically me, and although I have done many things in my life - conducting, playing piano, and so on - what is fundamental is my being a composer. ~ Morton Gould

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

The most uninteresting part of the biography of a composer is his childhood. All those preludes are the same and the reader hurries on to the fugue. ~ Dmitri Shostakovich

I cannot listen to Beethoven or Mahler or Chopin or Bach when I write because those composers require you stop what you are doing and listen. ~ Antonio Damasio

It is the power of music to carry one directly into the mental state of the composer. ~ Ludwig Van Beethoven

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. ~ Richard Rodgers

The thing about influence is that any composer worth anything will give you the same names. ~ Harrison Birtwistle

Not all, but too many of the best writers, composers, and artists of our time begin to be acclaimed only when they no longer have anything to say and take to performing instead of stating. ~ Clement Greenberg

A burst of Beethoven that would have made the composer glad he was deaf erupted from her i-Phone. ~ Ian Simpson

A supreme composer can only come out of a musical nation. ~ Ralph Vaughan Williams

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

Make your book of life a musical. Never abandon obligations, but have fun leaving behind a colorful legacy. Never allow anybody to be the composer of your own destiny. Take control of your life, and don't allow limitations implanted by society tell you how your music is supposed to sound - or how your book is supposed to be written. ~ Suzy Kassem

I think it's very good music composed by a human composer and sung by two birds with two feet and no feathers! ~ Alexandre Dumas

What [Tulio Serafin] said that impressed me was: "When one wants to find a gesture, when you want to find how to act on stage, all you have to do is listen to the music. The composer has already seen to that." If you take the trouble to really listen with your soul and with your ears - and I say soul and ears because the mind must work, but not too much also - you will find every gesture there. And it is all true, you know. ~ Maria Callas

In my next lifetime, I want to come back as a composer. ~ Bob Fosse

Take just one well-known event: The Beatles' 1964 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. This has been depicted with astonishing regularity as a pivotal cultural moment; in fact an entire movie -- I Wanna Hold Your Hand -- was built around it. And that Sullivan episode was indeed a major event in popular culture. But did you know that in 1961, 26 million people watched a CBS live broadcast of the first performance of a new symphony by classical composer Aaron Copland? Moreover, with all the attention that sixties rock groups receive, it may come as a surprise to learn that My Fair Lady was Columbia Records' biggest-selling album before the 1970s, beating out those of sixties icons Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and The Byrds. ~ Jonathan Leaf

The composer opens the cage door for arithmetic, the draftsman gives geometry its freedom. ~ Jean Cocteau

I really liked doing a number of the projects and directors, and etc., etc., I knew about half-way through that I would never be doing that again. It's just not me. I really am happy as a part-time film composer, not a full-time film composer. ~ Danny Elfman

It's amazing that schools still offer courses in musical composition. What a useless thing to spend money on -- to take a course in college to learn how to be a modern composer! No matter how good the course is, when you get out, what the fuck will you do for a living? (The easiest thing to do is become a composition teacher yourself, spreading 'the disease' to the next generation.)

One of the things that determines the curriculum in music schools is: which of the current fashions in modern music gets the most grant money from the mysterious benefactors in Foundation-Land. For a while there, unless you were doing serial music (in which the pitches have numbers, the dynamics have numbers, the vertical densities have numbers, etc) -- if it didn't have a pedigree like that, it wasn't a good piece of music. Critics and academicians stood by, waiting to tell you what a piece of shit your opus was if your numbers didn't add up. (Forget what it sounded like, or whether it moved anybody, or what it was about. The most important thing was the numbers. ~ Frank Zappa

All great composers of the past spent most of their time studying. Feeling alone won't do the job. A man also needs technique. ~ George Gershwin

I wanted to be a composer for a while, and for a while, and maybe still, I found writing music much easier than writing poetry. So maybe my brain clings to it. ~ Shane McCrae

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

The negative is the equivalent of the composer's score, and the print the performance. ~ Ansel Adams

Grace Slaughter - the surname of her fifth husband, a manufacturer of pharmaceutical toners and "prophylactic" products, recently deceased due to a ruptured peritoneum - was sharply chauvinistic and would allow no more than two exceptions to her all-American views, exceptions with which her first spouse, Astolphe de Guéménolé-Longtgermain, no doubt had something to do: cooking had to be done by French nationals of male gender, laundry and ironing by British subjects of female gender (and absolutely not by Chinese). That allowed Henri Fresnel to be hired without having to hide his original citizenship, which is what had to be done by the director (Hungarian), the set designer (Russian), the choreographer (Lithuanian), the dancers (Italian, Greek, Egyptian), the scriptwriter (English), the librettist (Austrian), and the composer, a Finn of Bulgarian descent with a large dash of Romanian. ~ Georges Perec