Composers Quotes

Then I started listenin' a lot to classical composers. Piano works. Just to see what they were doin'. That sort of put me in a different groove to try to blend all that in. ~ Mose Allison

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

Composers tend to assume that everyone loves music. Surprisingly enough, everyone doesn't. ~ Aaron Copland

The great opera composers were so good at their job, that the whole genre came to be built around the concept of the composer's vision. ~ Stewart Copeland

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

I have tremendous respect for film composers. ~ John Corigliano

In the civilization of our times, it is normal, and almost obligatory, for cookery and fashion to take up most of the culture sections, for chefs and fashion designers now enjoy the prominence that before was given to scientists, composers and philosophers. Gas burners, stoves and catwalks meld, in the cultural coordinates of our time, with books, laboratories and operas, while TV stars and great footballers exert the sort of influence over habits, taste and fashion that was previously the domain of teachers and thinkers ~ Mario Vargas-Llosa

The number of e-mails and letters that I get from choreographers, from sculptors, from composers who are being inspired by science is huge. ~ Brian Greene

I don't meet stockbrokers or carpenters or coal miners; I spend all day with actors, composers and photographers. ~ Michael Caine

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

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

Those who were still able to write beautiful melodies were kitsch composers like Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky approaches true art not in his numerous beautiful melodies, but when a melodic line is thwarted. ~ Slavoj Zizek

I took classical piano for a couple of years, but I sort of lost interest - I couldn't read a note today if I tried. I still enjoy that stuff, and I think I naturally gravitate towards the classical licks; in fact, I know that I do. I gravitate towards the classical licks that I heard by famous old composers. ~ Tom Scholz

And this totally normal conversation unspools from there, covering the basics: family, siblings, school, favorite composers, favorite movies, favorite wood (for carving puppets), the prehistory of the sandwich, and whether the ancient Romans got their togas caught in the spokes of their unicycles ~ Laini Taylor

There are two kinds of music. One comes from the strings of a guitar, the other from the strings of the heart. One sound comes from a chamber orchestra, the other from the beating of the heart's chamber. One comes from an instrument of graphite and wood, the other from an organ of flesh and blood. This loftier music I speak of tonight is more pleasing than the notes of the most gifted composers, more moving than a marching band, more harmonious than a thousand voices joined in hymn and more powerful than all the world's percussion instruments combined. That sweet sound of love. ~ Michael Jackson

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

It's a difficult path that we tread, us Indie self-publishers, but we're not alone. How many bands practicing in their dad's garage have heard of a group from the neighbourhood who got signed by a recording company? Or how many artists who love to paint, but are not really getting anywhere with it hear of someone they went to art school with being offered an exhibition in a gallery? How many chefs who love to get creative around food hear of someone else who's just landed a job with Marco Pierre White?
There's no difference between us and them. There is, however, a huge difference in how everyone else perceives the writer. And there's a huge difference between all of us – the writers, the musicians, the composers, the chefs, the dance choreographers and to a certain extent the tradesmen - and the rest of society in that no one understands us. It's a wretched dream to hope that our creativity gets recognised while our family thinks we're wasting our time when the lawn needs mowing, the deck needs painting and the bedroom needs decorating.
It's acceptable to go into the garage to tinker about with a motorbike, but it's a waste of a good Sunday afternoon if you go into the garage and practice your guitar, or sit in your study attempting to capture words that have been floating around your brain forever. ~ Karl Wiggins

There are only
two types of composers:
composing composers
and decomposing composers. ~ Lera Auerbach

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

Cope's bot can string together notes that weave in and out with the power of Beethoven or the finesse of Mozart. That a machine can produce things of such beauty is threatening to many in the music community. "If you've spent a good portion of your life being in love with these dead composers and along comes some twerp who claims to have this piece of software that can move you in the same way, suddenly you're asking yourself, 'What's happened here?'" Cope says. "I'm messing with some very powerful relationships. ~ Christopher Steiner

It was about finding creative, original musicians. Musicians who are strong composers. Flexible, empathetic musicians, who are great individually but who also have a great sense for cooperation and collaboration, great listeners as well as great players. ~ Joshua Redman

It is only by demanding the impossible of the piano that you can obtain from it all that is possible. For the psychologist this means that imagination and desire are ahead of the possible reality. A deaf Beethoven created for the piano sounds never heard before and thus predetermined the development of the piano for several decades to come. The composer's creative spirit imposes on the piano rules to which it gradually conforms. That is the history of the instrument's development. I don't know of any case where the reverse occurred. ~ Heinrich Neuhaus

Bad facts make bad law, and people who write bad laws are in my opinion more dangerous than songwriters who celebrate sexuality. Freedom of speech, freedom of religious thought, and the right to due process for composers, performers and retailers are imperiled if the PMRC and the major labels consummate this nasty bargain. ~ Frank Zappa

Known for his prose as for his poetry. The subsequent fame of his verse is due in part to the many composers who set poems, especially those in the Book of Songs, to music. Hence his early, lyrical verse became known at the expense of his later, predominantly satirical verse, and his verse has in turn overshadowed his prose. Yet Heine's prose is as rich in humour, satire, wit, lyricism, and ~ Heinrich Heine

Composers were warned not to strain the attention of their audience, as though we had not at our disposal different degrees of attention, among which it rests precisely with the artist himself to arouse the highest. For those who yawn with boredom after ten lines of a mediocre article have journeyed year after year to Bayreuth to listen to the Ring. ~ Marcel Proust

Andres Segovia literally created the genre of classical guitar, which hadn't existed before around 1910. There was flamenco, which he borrowed from, but he actually arranged the works of Mozart and other classical composers for guitar, something that had never been done before ... Segovias' style is not slick or contrived, but it's still very clean and his timing is impeccable ... it's got a feeling of casual elegance, as if he's sitting around the house in Spain with a jug of wine, just playing from the heart. ~ Roger McGuinn

Michelangelo is celebrated for the Sistine Chapel; in fact, he supervised a dozen unacknowledged assistants. Even one of the greatest composers, Johann Sebastian Bach, chose to deflect credit for his compositions, writing at the bottom of each of his pieces "SDG," for Soli Deo Gloria - to God alone the glory. By ~ Twyla Tharp

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

It's amazing how fast generations lose sight of other generations. One of the first things the young composers who come to work with me say is that they want to write music people will like, instead of gaining their credentials by being rejected by the audience. ~ Carlisle Floyd

Composers are not all good conductors. ~ Anton Seidl

If you force yourself to write away from the piano, you come up with more inventive things. If you're too good a piano player, as some composers are, the music may become flavorless and glib. And if you're not a very good pianist, you're limited to the same patterns. ~ Stephen Sondheim

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

I find I'm not one of these composers that are, you know, walking along a beach or walking on the mountainside in County Donegal that's, you know, 'Oh, a melody.' It's more a matter of eventually taking that moment with me to the studio, and it begins to evolve. ~ Enya

He talking Louisiana, you speaking Tennessee. The music so different, the sound coming from a different part of the body. It must of been like hearing lyrics set to scores by two different composers. But when you made love he must of have said I love you and you understood that and it was true, too, because I have seen the desperation in his eyes ever since - no matter what business venture he thinks up. ~ Toni Morrison

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

Composers should write tunes that chauffeurs and errand boys can whistle. ~ Thomas Beecham

I'm more encouraged by the saplings: new music groups, tiny new venues, entrepreneurial musician-composers who aren't waiting to be discovered but are instead building their own Establishment. ~ David Edelstein

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

He gives me the impression of being a spoilt child.

(on Liszt) ~ Clara Schumann

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

Composers, skilled in theory, hear music differently. CAT profiles of their listening brains show more verbal hemisphere activity, as if they don't just let the associative sensations of timber and rhythm swell through them, but somehow eavesdrop on a point being argued on thought's original instruments. Can the effect be any less beautiful for being better articulated? ~ Richard Powers

Before I was 5, I did have a lot of time on my hands. I had no job and really no career, and I spent an awful lot of time listening to records. It was more the classical ones, really - Prokofiev, and I think there was some Mozart in there, and more impressionistic composers like Delius. ~ Wallace Shawn

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

The ancient triumph of Christianity proved to be the single greatest cultural transformation our world has ever seen.

Without it the entire history of Late Antiquity would not have happened as it did.

We would never have had the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the Renaissance, or modernity as we know it.

There could never have been a Matthew Arnold. Or any of the Victorian poets. Or any of the other authors of our canon: no Milton, no Shakespeare, no Chaucer.

We would have had none of our revered artists: Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, or Rembrandt. And none of our brilliant composers: Mozart, Handel, or Bach.

To be sure, we would have had other Miltons, Michelangelos, and Mozarts in their places, and it is impossible to know whether these would have been better or worse.

But they would have been incalculably different. ~ Bart D. Ehrman

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

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

After listing the vast array of famous composers, artists, and authors who had created works based on Dante's epic poem, Langdon scanned the crowd. "So tell me, do we have any authors here tonight?" Nearly one-third of the hands went up. Langdon stared out in shock. Wow, either this is the most accomplished audience on earth, or this e-publishing thing is really taking off. ~ Dan Brown

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

Out of the choked Devonian waters emerged sight and sound and the music that rolls invisible through the composer's brain. They are there still in the ooze along the tideline, though no one notices. The world is fixed, we say: fish in the sea, birds in the air. But in the mangrove swamps by the Niger, fish climb trees and ogle uneasy naturalists who try unsuccessfully to chase them back to the water. There are things still coming ashore. ~ Loren Eiseley

The Russian composers, especially, tricked the symphony orchestra into the kind of dynamic, rhythmic thing. ~ Gerry Mulligan

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

I was very drawn to music of all types, from Beethoven to Jimi Hendrix. There were musicians and composers who obviously were expressing a vision that was beyond the mundane. ~ Frederick Lenz

Only classical composers were known by just their surnames, and this suited my mudlark temperament quite nicely. ~ Morrissey

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

So you're a real person! I always thought you were a legendary figure, like unicorns or Giuseppe Verdi. ~ Lemony Snicket

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

A lot of composers I know hate temp scores because people get attached to them. ~ Steven Price

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. ~ David Del Tredici

Composition is notation of distortion of what composers think they've heard before. Masterpieces are marvelous misquotations. ~ Ned Rorem

I look at composers and conductors, anybody involved in music or writing or art in general; they got more done as they got older. If I can, I'll be one of those people because what I do is my passion. ~ Sarah Brightman

Of all composers, past and present, I am the least learned. I mean that in all seriousness, and by learning I do not mean knowledge of music. ~ Giuseppe Verdi

A statue of Arturo Prat, hero of the Chilean Navy, surveyed it all. From under his statue I look up onto those fragrant wooded hills. The shanty houses blur into a pastiche of colour, yellows and reds, cobalt and purple. The washing lines strung across the stairways and hung from balconies echo the ships' flags fluttering in the harbour.

This is a city of the muses. For poets, painters and composers. This is the artists' enclave. This is Venice and Florence waiting to be explored, and I dream it still. ~ Brian Keenan

Sibelius justified the austerity of his old age by saying that while other composers were engaged in manufacturing cocktails, he offered the public pure cold water. ~ Neville Cardus

It all depends on the directors. Working closely with a director is the main job of a film composer. Interpreting what he perceives as a color, an emotion or mood is very abstract. A director tells you something he wants and then you have to run back. ~ Danny Elfman

To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic. ~ Roger Ebert

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

Good composers don't borrow, they steal ~ Igor Stravinsky

The people of your century no longer require the service of composers. A composer is as useful to a person in a jogging suit as a dinsoaur turd in the middle of his runway. ~ Frank Zappa

In Hollywood, the rainbow hits the ground for composers. ~ Hoagy Carmichael

The artists are the most powerful ones, the creators, first are the painters, working without words, second are the music composers, and third are the writers. ~ Robert Black

Most of the arts, as painting, sculpture, and music, have emotional appeal to the general public. This is because these arts can be experienced by some one or more of our senses. Such is not true of the art of mathematics; this art can be appreciated only by mathematicians, and to become a mathematician requires a long period of intensive training. The community of mathematicians is similar to an imaginary community of musical composers whose only satisfaction is obtained by the interchange among themselves of the musical scores they compose. ~ Cornelius Lanczos

I know I have experience, having worked with the likes of legendary composers like Ilaiyaraaja. And, I've been long enough with my dear friend A. R. Rahman, and we've collaborated on several musical works. All this gives me confidence. ~ Sivamani

The great composers I worked with along the way, I always felt they were filmmakers more than composers. They would talk about the story rather than the music. ~ Steven Price

It's no longer unusual for real avant-garde composers to have been in a band, and for bands to be interested in a wide range of music. Look at how artists like Aphex Twin are influenced by Nancarrow and Stockhausen. ~ Jonny Greenwood

It is necessary for us to explain the involuntary repugnance we possess for the nature and personality of the Jews ... The Jews have never produced a true poet. Heinrich Heine reached the point where he duped himself into a poet, and was rewarded by his versified lies being set to music by our own composers. He was the conscience of Judaism, just as Judaism is the evil conscience of our modern civilization. ~ Richard Wagner

Fortunately, I'm able to make a living from comics, so I'm privileged enough to be quite choosy, though most cartoonists can't afford to be. It's really an uncomfortable situation, since I'm not an illustrator, though I do get calls from morally indefensible businesses offering me money to decorate their ambitions. It's extremely rare, almost unheard of, in fact, that I am asked to do a comic strip. Do writers get calls to pen Toyota advertisements? Do composers get asked to write chamber pieces about exercise machines? ~ Chris Ware

With recording, everything changed. The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one's furniture. It's an idea that many composers have felt reluctant about because it seemed to them to diminish the importance of music. ~ Brian Eno

All is made clear,regarding Abraham and Sarah's traversal into Egypt, when we realize what biblicists meant by the term "Egypt." As Ralph Ellis so brilliantly points out, the name Egypt was employed by the composers of the Old Testament to denote Thebes in Lower Egypt. This was the city and region controlled by the adversaries of the Hyksos. It was considered a separate region, with different rulers, gods, customs, and politics. So, it was not the country of Egypt that Abraham visited, but Thebes within Egypt. ~ Michael Tsarion

Not many composers have ideas. Far more of them know how to use strange instruments which do not require ideas. ~ George Gershwin

George Rochberg once said that 'to be a composer, you need to have fire in the belly, fire in the brain, but most importantly, an iron stomach.' I feel this is for the most part true, and hope I might convey something of it to younger composers. ~ Michael Hersch

Remember always that the composer's pen is still mightier than the bow of the violinist; in you lie all the possibilities of the creation of beauty. ~ John Philip Sousa

The record company started as an adjunct to that, to give young composers their first recorded performances; to give young musicians their first debut on a recording. These are all things that big record companies would never touch because there is no money in it! ~ Gunther Schuller

History's greatest composers world be rolling in their graves if they knew that their beautiful compositions were reduced to distorted hold music. ~ Michael P. Naughton

I don't think a guy that really has no understanding about people, or has no interest in understanding people would make a good film composer. ~ Stanley Clarke

There's no card, business card, better than a compact disc for a composer. It doesn't half impress people and they get a long way on it ... these composers they will get more performances, more commissions, more recognition just by having that disc ~ Peter Maxwell Davies

As a pianist, our particular role is to enter a piece and its logic and create a particular interpretation from our understanding. The most important thing for the performer is, after all, to create a special atmosphere - we enter the composer's feelings and emotions and recreate them freshly for a given audience. ~ Rafal Blechacz

A composer's job involves the decoration of fragments of time. ~ Frank Zappa

I went to Hollywood. I put the action in Hollywood. I watched a lot of movies, maybe 100 or something close to that. I have tons of DVDs now at home. I don't know what to do with them because they're not useful anymore. My kids never watched them. I read a lot of autobiographies, listened to a lot of music by classical era composers like Franz Waxman, Max Steiner, Bernard Herrmann, Alfred Newman and Leonard Bernstein. I listened to only that kind of music the entire time I was writing, even at home. ~ Michel Hazanavicius

These composers," Captain Nemo answered me, "are the contemporaries of Orpheus, because in the annals of the dead, all chronological differences fade; and ~ Jules Verne

Statistically in the UK, there are so many fewer female composers than male songwriters and they're marketed in a way that - females are marketed in a way that they're these independent unique artists writing their own stuff, and they're not, because fourteen percent of PRS goes to women. ~ Kate Nash

Let us not forget that the greatest composers were also the greatest thieves. They stole from everyone and everywhere. ~ Pablo Casals

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

A whole generation of veteran composers has never taken a stand or provided an example and has produced in the music academies generations of docile workers for the music industry. What can you expect from downtrodden workers who see music as a type of profession, like stenography, and not an act of creation that by its nature is subversive? ~ Itay Talgam

Playwrights have texts, composers have scores, painters and sculptors have the residue of those activities, and dance is traditionally an ephemeral, effervescent, here-today-gone-tomorrow kind of thing. ~ Twyla Tharp

History's greatest composers would be appalled to hear their greatest works reduced to distorted hold music for businesses. ~ Michael P. Naughton

In simple hearts the feeling for the beauty and grandeur of nature is a hundred-fold stronger and more vivid than in us, ecstatic composers of narratives in words and on paper. ~ Mikhail Lermontov

Composers in the old days used to keep strictly to the base of the theme, as their real subject. Beethoven varies the melody, harmony and rhythms so beautifully. ~ Johannes Brahms