Vulpius Composer Quotes

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

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

The more dollars the studio producers put in, the less freedom we have. If the budget hits $100m, they get scared - they'll take the existing score of a successful movie and expect composers to copy it, like wallpaper. The biggest challenge for any composer in Hollywood is to be as creative as possible within those boundaries. ~ A.R. Rahman

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

I usually need a lot of time to be completely alone with the particular piece, the composer, and the instrument. I also prefer a very quiet atmosphere, and I usually choose pieces that are very close to my personality, my heart. I think the audience can feel it. ~ Rafal Blechacz

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

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

Music can be appreciated from several points of view: the listener, the performer, the composer. In mathematics there is nothing analogous to the listener; and even if there were, it would be the composer, rather than the performer, that would interest him. It is the creation of new mathematics, rather than its mundane practice, that is interesting. Mathematics is not about symbols and calculations. These are just tools of the tradequavers and crotchets and five-finger exercises. Mathematics is about ideas. In particular it is about the way that different ideas relate to each other. If certain information is known, what else must necessarily follow? The aim of mathematics is to understand such questions by stripping away the inessentials and penetrating to the core of the problem. It is not just a question of getting the right answer; more a matter of understanding why an answer is possible at all, and why it takes the form that it does. Good mathematics has an air of economy and an element of surprise. But, above all, it has significance. ~ Ian Stewart

I am..."
Who was I? Daughter, sister, wife, queen, composer; these were the titles I had been given and claimed, but they were not the whole of me. They were not me, entire. I closed my eyes.
"I am," I said slowly, "a girl with music in her soul. I am a sister, daughter, a friend, who fiercely protects those dear to her. I am a girl who loves strawberries, chocolate torte, songs in a minor key, moments stolen from chores, and childish games. I am short-tempered yet disciplined. I am self-indulgent, selfish, yet selfless. I am compassion and hatred and contradiction. I am... me. ~ S. Jae-Jones

One is seduced and battered in turn. The result is presumably wisdom. Wisdom! We are clinging to life like lizards.
Why is it so difficult to assemble those things that really matter in life and to dwell among them only? I am referring to certain landscapes, persons, beasts, books, rooms, meteorological conditions, fruits. In fact, I insist on it.
A letter is like a poem, it leaps into life and shows very clearly the marks, perhaps I should say thumbprints, of an unwilling or unready composer. ~ James Salter

Composers love to write for symphony orchestras because the symphony is the Rolls Royce of musical instruments. ~ David Del Tredici

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

When I was 20, Shostakovich was my favorite composer. I still find his Fifth Symphony wonderful, with its outstanding themes and rhythms. That's the piece that made me want to be a classical composer. ~ Dave Brubeck

I am proud to be able to claim that, from the age of nineteen, I've managed to earna living entirely as a composer. ~ Richard Rodney Bennett

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

Studying Mahler changed many things in my tastes as a composer. Mahler & Berg are my favourite composers even today, as opposed to Hindemith, say, a Krenek and Milhaud whom I liked when I was young but cooled towards rapidly. ~ Dmitri Shostakovich

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

Handel is the greatest composer that ever lived ... I would uncover my head and kneel down on his tomb. ~ Ludwig Van Beethoven

In a conversation with the master jazz musician and Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Wynton Marsalis, he told me, "You need to have some restrictions in jazz. Anyone can improvise with no restrictions, but that's not jazz. Jazz always has some restrictions. Otherwise it might sound like noise." The ability to improvise, he said, comes from fundamental knowledge, and this knowledge "limits the choices you can make and will make ~ Sheena Iyengar

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

A good composer does not imitate; he steals. ~ Igor Stravinsky

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

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

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

At the age of six, Mahler accepted paid commissions as a composer, something he was never to do in later life, his mother having promised him two kreuzers on condition that he did not make any ink blots on the expensive music manuscript paper. ~ Jens Malte Fischer

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 came up in the '60s; that was a time when there was a revolution going on in music. Stravinsky had become a twelve-tone composer; even Aaron Copland was writing twelve-tone pieces at that time! ~ Paul Lansky

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

There is no "End" to be written, neither can you, like an architect, engrave in stone the day the garden was finished. A painter can frame his picture, a composer can notate his coda, but a garden is always on the move. ~ Mirabel Osler

Although he had certain talents as a musician and a composer, he lacked the charisma or showmanship or whatever it was that made a performer stand out ~ Nicholas Sparks

In chamber music, the audience can hear each instrument and understand (and feel) what the composer and the musicians have in mind as they play. ~ Karen DeCrow

'How big's your dick?' Zak blurted.
His father gave a roar of outrage.
'How good's your dental plan?' asked Number Five.
Zak laughed.
'You can't ask that,' his father snapped at his side.
'My favorite composer is Rachmaninov. My last client moved to New Zealand. There's nothing stuck to my shoe. I had fruit for breakfast and I don't waste my time worrying. I make sure there's never anything to worry about.' He walked across the room and put his mouth close to Zak's ear. 'In answer to your last. How responsive's your gag reflex?' ~ Barbara Elsborg

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

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

I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer. ~ Leonard Bernstein

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

My primary calling, I always knew since the age of 11, was as a composer, and so that had to take priority. ~ Gunther Schuller

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

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

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

There's people making babies to my music. That's nice. ~ Barry White

Deep Listening is listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear no matter what you are doing. Such intense listening includes the sounds of daily life, of nature, or one's own thoughts as well as musical sounds. Deep Listening represents a heightened state of awareness and connects to all that there is. As a composer I make my music through Deep Listening ~ Pauline Oliveros