Giampieri Composer Quotes

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

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. ~ Edmund Phelps

That is the operatic problem; the singer must keep up a big head of steam while trying to appear secretive, or seductive, or consumptive. Some ingenious composer should write an opera about a group of people who were condemned by a cruel god to scream all the time; it would be an instantaneous success, and a triumph of versimilitude. ~ Robertson Davies

It's nice that all the composers have said that nobody interprets a lyric like Fred Astaire. But when it comes to selling records I was never worth anything particularly except as a collector's item. ~ Fred Astaire

Because I have sixty years of being a professional composer, conductor, musician, whatever, and you develop a lot of friendships and you get involved with a lot of sort of long-term commitments and obligations. ~ Gunther Schuller

A Composer who hears sounds will try to find a notation for sounds. One who has ideas will find one that expresses his ideas, leaving their interpretation free, in confidence that his ideas have been accurately and concisely notated. ~ Cornelius Cardew

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

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

It's funny because as a composer, you want to hear your songs live on. I think a lot of times people will create a song and it becomes stagnant or something that they're no longer interested in playing, and they leave it alone. ~ Christian Scott

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

Why should a novelist not also be a historian? To force unnatural divisions within the English language is to work against its capacious and accommodating nature. To expect a writer to produce only novels, or only histories, is equivalent to demanding from a composer that he or she write only string quartets or piano sonatas. ~ Peter Ackroyd

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

A man with a talent does what is expected of him, makes his way, constructs, is an engineer, a composer, a builder of bridges. It's the natural order of things that he construct objects outside himself and his family. The woman who does so is aberrant. We have to expiate for this cursed talent someone handed out to us, by mistake, in the black mystery of genetics. ~ May Sarton

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

We praise the singer, not the composer.
We admire the painting, not the painter.
We judge by the cake's icing, not its bread.
We evaluate the workers, not their head.

We rate highly the cuisine, not the chef.
We point fingers at others, not our self.
We look at peoples' faces, not their hearts.
We always assess the ends, not the starts. ~ Rodolfo Martin Vitangcol

Part of what Brahms and others could never quite get over was that Bruckner the composer of epic symphonies behaved, much of the time, like a nincompoop. ~ Jan Swafford

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

That takes such active, intelligent creativity, analyzing the emotions a composer intends in those scratchy notes on a page, learning and perfecting the technique that gives you the skill to bring those skeletal notations to full-fleshed life in your performance. As far as I am concerned, Eliza, that is the greatest act of intelligence a human being is capable of. Music is air made rapturous, achieving the sublime, catching the harmony of the spheres for a fleeting moment so we can hear it. It is the closest we get to God. So, therefore, it is pure brilliance of the soul. ~ L.M. Elliott

The real architecture happens within the works themselves, and that was done by the composer. That's where the real skill is. In putting together a program, you're more a curator, but that's important as well. And then the interpreting of it is where our big job is. ~ Joshua Bell

The world is composed of lies. Starting from a kid's cute lie, a teen's white lie, a youth's smart lie, it grows older with us, romantic lies as a couple, effusive lies as a parent and unavoidable lies at old age. Lies are beautiful, lies are awkward. Lies are stupid, lies are witty. Everyone is a classical composer and lifetime listener of lies. ~ Ram Vignesh

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

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

Presenting Aschenbach as a composer - based on Mahler - leads to some dreadful scenes (especially those in which Aschenbach is berated by his student), and it surely distorts the character Mann created. Yet, we know that Mann's novella was based on a holiday in Venice he took with his wife and brother, and that while he was there he followed the reports in the German newspapers, describing the dying Mahler's progress as he returned from New York to Vienna. ~ Philip Kitcher

You are the composer and conductor and thus decide what key of life to live. I choose major over minor whenever I can. ~ Susan Reynolds

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

Seen from the point of view of the composer, the most nonsensical practice is that of casting people in musicals who are unable to sing. No one would cast a dancing part with someone who cannot dance sufficiently to come up to professional standards. The same is true of acting. But when it comes to singing, more often than not it is amateur night ... Either musicals should be written for specified performers in the first place, or they should be cast with people who are adequate to its dancing, acting and singing demands. ~ Ernest Gold

Meredith's father, the composer, who shot himself in this house. Came all the way from Vienna to shoot himself in LA. Escaped the Nazis but not himself. ~ Janet Fitch

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

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

I have no illusions about being a genius musician. I pride myself on being a soldier, a warrior for jazz. I trained a lot of young people, and I've learned my lessons well. I'd like to keep the flame burning. ~ Phil Woods

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 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

Composition is interesting because, in a sense, you always have to let it go. Unless you're a true composer/performer, you're always sending a PDF and then someone else makes it. It's like instructions for a short story, faxed to every English student who's studying it. ~ Nico Muhly

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

Wynton Marsalis' skills have grown as fast as his ambition, and he is the most ambitious younger composer in Jazz. ~ Jon Pareles

I don't work with an outline, except a vague one in my head, a general idea of character, place, arc ... I'm like a composer with a symphony in their head: I can hear the music, I just have to figure out how to put it down on paper. But I don't always know where my stories are going when I begin. ~ Said Sayrafiezadeh

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

Although in society in general, the idea of an Irish composer of 'classical music', or whatever you want to call it, is still a strange item, generally speaking. Even in the arts, among our fellow creative artists in other disciplines, you still feel slightly out of it. ~ John Kinsella

Sometimes the personality or just the particular process of a director can really affect your quality of life as a composer in terms of how much time you spend away from your family or the amount of time you spend doing the type of work that you maybe don't consider as fun to do as other type of work. ~ Christophe Beck

Stravinsky is one of the greatest composers of our time and I truly love many of his works. ( ... ) The marvellous composer has invariably been at the centre of my attention, and I not only studied and listened to his music, but I played it and made my own transcriptions as well. ~ Dmitri Shostakovich

I believe that interpretation should be like a transparent glass, a window for the composer's music. ~ Vladimir Ashkenazy

When we play music we describe the echo the tableau of natural forms, their shapes and arrangements, as uncovered by the composer's imagination, which yet must be filtered through our own. There is no other way. And in acknowledging this tableau, this revelation, we must "hesitate", we must doubt, as the composer doubted, for no valid creation can issue unscarred by doubt, by that vast flux of wonder which precedes the construction of being. ~ Russell Sherman

I would prefer to listen to a French classical composer like Olivier Messiaen than to the pop hits of the day. ~ Matt Groening

Elizabeth Lutyens was the first professional composer that I ever knew. I sent someextremely infantile pieces that I I'd written and got marvellous encouragement andinterest from her ... she's certainly the English composer who's influenced me themost. ~ Richard Rodney Bennett

I've been called a minimalist composer for more than 30 years, and while I've never really agreed with the description, I've gotten used to it. ~ Philip Glass

I don't think that Prokofiev ever treated me seriously as a composer; he considered only Stravinsky a rival and never missed a chance to take a shot at him. I remember once he started telling me some vile story about Stravinsky. I cut him off. ~ Dmitri Shostakovich