Subotnick Composer Quotes

The terror of performing never goes away. Instead, you get very, very comfortable being terrified. ~ Eric Whitacre

To find a new British composer who is really good is rare. ~ Tim Rice

Writing is a little athletic for me. I get worked up a little bit when I do it. So I guess I'm a little bit like that composer conducting. There are a lot of things that go into what I do, but I think athletics really sort of shaped my ethic. ~ Chris Carter

Every bit of theorizing I've ever done, including my interest in Berg, has come as a consequence of discoveries I made as a composer and interests that I developed as a composer. I never thought of my theory as being a kind of irrelevant activity to my composing. ~ George Perle

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

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

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 surprised bookseller, whose name (inexplicably) was Mendelssohn. He was no relation to the German composer, and this Mendelssohn either overliked his last name or disliked his first so much that he never revealed it. (When Ted had once asked him his first name, Mendelssohn had said only: "Not Felix.") ~ John Irving

My favorite instrument is the snare drum. In Scotland, the snare drum is very prominent in Highland bands. The Scottish style of playing is in my blood. It's a very powerful instrument, but it can also be soothing, like velvet. It's a real challenge for composers. ~ Evelyn Glennie

They were looking for a builder to construct the home they thought they wanted, but he was the architect, coming with a new plan that would give them everything they needed, but within quite a new framework. They were looking for a singer to sing the song they had been humming for a long time, but he was the composer, bringing them a new song to which the old songs they knew would form, at best, the background music. He was the king, all right, but he had come to redefine kingship itself around his own work, his own mission, his own fate. ~ N. T. Wright

Be persistent. Establishing yourself in this field could easily take years. Rarely will any composer get that one "big break." More often, success is built on hundreds - or thousands - of very small breaks. When I decided that I was definitely going to pursue a career as a film composer, I decided I was going to beat my head against that particular wall until something broke. ~ John Keltonic

For me personally - because I do it myself - the scoring of a picture is fun. I edit the picture and when I've finished I go into my room and I have many many records - jazz, classical and popular music. And I have this all at my disposal. I don't have to get a composer. ~ Woody Allen

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

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

Composers today get a TV script on Friday and have to record on Tuesday. It's just dreadful to impose on gifted talent and expect decent music under these conditions. ~ Alex North

I'm less interested in uniqueness than in goodness. I see so many concerts where the program notes are more interesting than the music. I remember talking to one composer who went through the most complicated mathematical algorithm to generate some material from scratch. It took weeks and weeks, and he came up with a C major chord. For me, honesty is more interesting than originality. ~ Anna Meredith

If a composer has a nice wife and some nice children, how can he let the children starve on his dissonances? ~ Charles Ives

A composer who can lift the spirit of a million people with a song, is a definite force for good. ~ Abhijit Naskar

History was an artist, maintaining the idea but changing the details, like a composer keeping the same theme but dulling it to a minor or lifting by an octave, now crooning it with violins, now blaring it on trumpets. ~ George R. Stewart

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

With Hitchcock I had little relationship. I was called to replace Bernard Herrmann, his favorite composer, in Torn Curtain, after the bitter fight between them. ~ Maurice Jarre

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

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 may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer. ~ Richard Strauss

People don't live their lives in a series of scenes that form a dramatic narrative, they don't speak in dialogue, they're not lit by a cinematographer or scored by a composer. The properties of real life and the properties of drama have almost nothing to do with each other. The difference between writing about reporters and being a reporter is the same as the difference between drawing a building and building a building. ~ Aaron Sorkin

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

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

Copland was the first important American classical composer to go to work for Hollywood. ~ Terry Teachout

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

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

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

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

Even if, in one or other of them, I had a particular word or words in mind, I would not tell anyone, because the same word means different things to different people. Only the songs say the same thing, arouse the same feeling, in everyone - a feeling that can't be expressed in words. ~ Felix Mendelssohn

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

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

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

Soon, I knew that I would become a chemist, rather than a composer. ~ Richard Ernst

There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. ~ John Cage

If a composer could state in words what being a composer means, he would no longer need to be a composer. ~ Ned Rorem