Hungarian Composer Quotes

In major movies these days, the fine details of music, instrumentation and sound design are lost. This is a shame, and it is one of the various reasons that make me not want to be part of the entertainment business. Although I have done it in the past, finally I know that I'm not here to create industry products. Music is more than images, it's more than language ... it's the medium that's capable of communicating the answers to the Big Questions. ~ Julius Dobos

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

Upon this the Hungarian ministers resigned, but the names submitted by the president of the council, at the demand of the king, were not approved of for successors. ~ Lajos Kossuth

Everything we do is music." (Classical Composer)(From: 4'33") ~ John Cage

I am a composer in search of oblivion; and I'm always slightly ashamed to admit that I compose. ~ Alexander Borodin

I like to read and dream and create music that is based on the imagery of text. If you have the combination of a great book and a great filmmaker, what could be better for the composer? ~ Howard Shore

In all worthy music, in fact, the chief point of interest is the music itself which speaks to us in its own language of sound and rhythm. A knowledge of form is but a means to an end: for the composer, that he may express himself clearly and convincingly, and for the listener, that he may readily receive the message set forth. ~ Walter Raymond Spalding

I'm like any other composer. If you give me five years to write a symphony, I'm still going to be asking for more time two days before it's due. ~ Darren Criss

The quest for knowledge is what makes humans survive, even if it hurts." I have trouble imagining that this éminence grise was once a sixteen-year-old Hungarian boy in a death camp. "There's a troublesome verse from Ecclesiastes about this," he tells me. "It says that the more we know, the more pain we have. But because we are human beings, this must be. Otherwise we become objects rather than subjects." He pauses for a moment to let this sink in. "Of course, it hurts when we see pictures of people throwing themselves out of windows, children who are orphaned, the widows," Wiesel says. "But there is no way out of what we've seen." "And how do we live with what we know?" I ask "How can we live with not knowing? ~ Mark Matousek

The composers hated me. The singers detested me. The guitarists were terrified by me. ~ Bulat Okudzhava

Every Hungarian wishes to die an elegant gentleman ~ Igor Janke

The Rhapsody is not a composition at all. It's a string of separate paragraphs stuck together - with a thin paste of flour and water ... I don't think there has been such an inspired melodist on this earth since Tchaikovsky ... but if you want to speak of a composer, that's another matter. ~ Leonard Bernstein

And you rage and scream and reach through the Force to crush the shadow who has destroyed you, but you are so far less now than what you were, you are more than half machine, you are like a painter gone blind, a composer gone deaf, you can remember where the power was but the power you can touch is only a memory, and so with all your world-destroying fury it is only droids around you that implode, and equipment, and the table on which you were strapped shatters, and in the end, you cannot touch the shadow. In the end you don't even want to. In the end, you do not even want to. In the end, the shadow is all you have left. Because the shadow understands you, the shadow forgives you, the shadow gathers you unto itself - And within your furnace heart, you burn in your own flame. ~ Matthew Woodring Stover

However, in three months of fighting, and with the men who died or surrendered at Przemysl included, the Austro-Hungarian Army has lost nearly 950,000 men killed, wounded, and captured. This ~ Matt Kersley

The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways. ~ Ansel Adams

It is true that I am a writer, and I was married to a composer, and I have lived in a small village in New England, but my children are not named Heracles and Persephone, and my daughter doesn't disappear underground every six months and emerge in the spring. ~ Jamaica Kincaid

It still amazes me how many musicians aren't really interested in engaging with their audience at all. Alfred Brendel, a pianist for whom I have the greatest respect, has described performance as a sacred communion between the artist and the composer. But what about the audience? Music is communication, a two-way street. ~ Charles Hazlewood

Others take a more cynical view, believing that the Cypriots have little inclination to reach a solution as they actually rather enjoy the international attention they receive. As George Mikes, a Hungarian wit, once famously, if rather unfairly, put it, 'Realizing they will never be a world power, the Cypriots have decided to settle for being a world nuisance'. ~ James Ker-Lindsay

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

You see the genius that Whitney Houston has as an interpreter of material, and you realize why genius can be applied to only a few interpretive performers. She finds meaning and depth and soulfulness in a song that often the writer and composer never really knew was there. ~ Clive Davis

I will not mention the name (and what bits of it I happen to give here appear in decorous disguise) of that man, that Franco-Hungarian writer... I would rather not dwell upon him at all, but I cannot help it - he is surging up from under my pen. Today one does not hear much about him; and this is good, for it proves that I was right in resisting his evil spell, right in experiencing a creepy chill down my spine whenever this or that new book of his touched my hand. The fame of his likes circulates briskly but soon grows heavy and stale; and as for history it will limit his life story to the dash between two dates. Lean and arrogant, with some poisonous pun ever ready to fork out and quiver at you, and with a strange look of expectancy in his dull brown veiled eyes, this false wag had, I daresay, an irresistible effect on small rodents. Having mastered the art of verbal invention to perfection, he particularly prided himself on being a weaver of words, a title he valued higher than that of a writer; personally, I never could understand what was the good of thinking up books, of penning things that had not really happened in some way or other; and I remember once saying to him as I braved the mockery of his encouraging nods that, were I a writer, I should allow only my heart to have imagination, and for the rest rely upon memory, that long-drawn sunset shadow of one's personal truth.

I had known his books before I knew him; a faint disgust was already replacing the ~ Vladimir Nabokov

A man comes to Mozart and wants to become a composer. Mozart says that they have to study theory for a couple of years, that they should study orchestration and become proficient at the piano, and goes on like this. Finally, the man says "but you wrote your first symphony when you were 8 years old." Mozart says "Yes, but I didn't ask anybody. ~ Richard David Feinman

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

Creative force, like a musical composer, goes on unweariedly repeating a simple air or theme, now high, now low, in solo, in chorus, ten thousand times reverberated, till it fills earth and heaven with the chant. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

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. ~ A.R. Rahman

My mother, Minuetta Kessler, was a concert pianist and composer who performed at Carnegie Hall and Town Hall. ~ Ronald Kessler

If I belong to a tradition, it is a tradition that makes the masterpiece tell the performer what to do, and not the performer telling the piece what it should be like, or the composer what he ought to have composed. ~ Alfred Brendel

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

'Neverwhere,' by Benjamin Millepied, is set to his favorite composer, Nico Muhly. ~ Robert Gottlieb

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

I'm interested in what happens to music when other people use it. Whereas there are composers who don't like anyone to touch their music, I think people should because they do things I can't think of. ~ Philip Glass

Music is exciting and easy to enjoy, the rhythm and voice.
It does not need interpretation. That is why it is called the Universal Language. ~ Ellen J. Barrier

I pay no attention whatever to anybody's praise or blame. I simply follow my own feelings. ~ Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

When my opera Plump Jack was performed in 1989, my first piano teacher sent me something that I'd composed when I was four. I remember I played it, and it still sounded like me. I'm the same composer I was then. ~ Gordon Getty

The psychological detective story in "Equus" made Peter Shaffer's name as a playwright. But it was his next play, "Amadeus," that cemented his reputation, largely because of the movie version. Another battle of wills, it was the story of composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart seen through the eyes of lesser composer Antonio Salieri. ~ Bob Mondello

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