Composition Quotes - Page 13

• I may juggle the composition, as the strength of a picture is in the composition. Or I may play with the light. But I never interfere with the subject. The subject has to fall into place on its own and, if I don't like it, I don't have to print it

  George Rodger

  Fall, Light, Play

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• Man is a creature adapted for life under circumstances which are very narrowly limited. A few degrees of temperature more or less, a slight variation in the composition of air, the precise suitability of food, makes all the difference between health and sickness; between life and death.

  Robert Stawell Ball

  Nature, Men, Air

  Sir Robert Stawell Ball (2016). “The Story of the Heavens”, p.125, Sai ePublications via PublishDrive

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• It wasn't even a matter of what I was photographing, as what had happened to me in the process. When I discovered that I could look at the horror of Belsen --4000 dead and starving lying around-- and think only of a nice photographic composition, I knew something had happened to me and I had to stop. I felt I was like the people running the camp --it didn't mean a thing.

  George Rodger

  Running, Nice, Lying

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• The sense of motion in painting and sculpture has long been considered as one of the primary elements of the composition.

  Alexander Calder

  Long, Sculpture, Elements

  "Statement from Modern Painting and Sculpture". August, 1933.

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• On what can we now place our hopes of solving the many riddles which still exist as to the origin and composition of cosmic rays?

  Victor Francis Hess

  Rays, Riddle, Cosmic

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• I studied harmony and composition in a very spontaneous manner.

  Alejo Carpentier

  Spontaneity, Spontaneous, Harmony

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• An artist who wants to transpose a composition onto a larger canvas must conceive it over again in order to preserve its expression; he must alter its character and not just fill in the squares into which he has divided his canvas.

  Henri Matisse

  Character, Artist, Squares

  Henri Matisse, Susan Lambert, Victoria and Albert Museum (1981). “Matisse lithographs”

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• Whenever you study composition you inevitably encounter Bach right off the bat. You can't get across the room without running into him and the other greats. Analyzing Bach absolutely influenced my jazz playing.

  Howard Roberts

  Music, Running, Bats

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• An entire composition written in jazz could not live.

  George Gershwin

  Jazz, Gershwin, Written

  "Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources". Book editing by Daniel Albright (University of Chicago Press), essay "The Composer in the Machine Age" (1933), 2004.

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• Monk taught me more about music composition than anyone else on 52nd Street.

  Miles Davis

  Music, Taught, Jazz

  Miles Davis, Quincy Troupe (1990). “Miles”, Simon and Schuster

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• If the reader were so rash as to purchase any of Bela Bartok's compositions, he would find that they each and all consist of unmeaning bunches of notes, apparently representing the composer promenading the keyboard in his boots. Some can be played better with the elbows, others with the flat of the hand. None require fingers to perform or ears to listen too.

  Frederick Corder

  Hands, Musical, Boots

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• In 1968 I ran into Steve Lacy on the street in Rome. I took out my pocket tape recorder and asked him to describe in fifteen seconds the difference between composition and improvisation. He answered: "In fifteen seconds the difference between composition and improvisation is that in composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in fifteen seconds, while in improvisation you have fifteen seconds." His answer lasted exactly fifteen seconds.

  Frederic Rzewski

  Music, Rome, Differences

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• When an actor is in the moment, he or she is engaged in listening for the next right thing creatively. When a painter is painting, he or she may begin with a plan, but that plan is soon surrendered to the painting's own plan. This is often expressed as 'The brush takes the next stroke.' In dance, in composition, in sculpture, the experience is the same: we are more the conduit than the creator of what we express

  Julia Margaret Cameron

  Listening, Sculpture, Actors

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• I am now satisfied that the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called negro melodies. This must be the real foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States.

  Antonin Dvorak

  Country, Real, School

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• Only an unhinged movie survives as a disconnected series of images, of peaks, of visual icebergs. It should display not one central idea but many. It should not reveal a coherent philosophy of composition. It must live on, and because of, its glorious ricketiness.

  Umberto Eco

  Philosophy, Ideas, Should

  Umberto Eco (2014). “Travels in Hyperreality”, p.209, HMH

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• My compositions spring from my sorrows. Those that give the world the greatest delight were born of my deepest griefs.

  Franz Schubert

  Spring, Grief, Giving

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• We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Games, Play, Moments

  Michel de Montaigne (1958). “Complete Essays”, p.244, Stanford University Press

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• I tell you before God, and as an honest man, your son (W A Mozart)is the greatest composer known to me by person and repute, he has taste and what is more the greatest skill in composition.

  Joseph Haydn

  Son, Men, Skills

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• I will gladly give lessons as a favor, particularly when I see that my student has talent, inclination, and anxiety to learn; but to be obliged to go to a house at a certain hour, or to have to wait at home for a pupil, is what I cannot do, no matter how much money it may bring me in. . . I am a composer and was born to be a Kapellmeister. I neither can nor ought to bury the talent for composition with which God in his goodness has so richly endowed me. . .

  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

  Home, Giving, House

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• The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic.

  Gertrude Stein

  Art, Classic, Outlaw

  Gertrude Stein, Ulla E. Dydo (1993). “A Stein Reader”, p.496, Northwestern University Press

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• Thank you Rob for the honor you have brought to our city with this oustanding composition.

  Rocky Anderson

  Cities, Honor

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• For many years I have lived with a secret, in a secrecy imposed on all specialists in astronautics. I can now reveal that every day, in the USA, our radar instruments capture objects of form and composition unknown to us. And there are thousands of witness reports and a quantity of documents to prove this, but nobody wants to make them public. Why? Because authority is afraid that people may think of God knows what kind of horrible invaders. So the password still is: We have to avoid panic by all means

  Gordon Cooper

  Mean, Thinking, Years

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• When composing a verse let there not be a hair's breath separating your mind from what you write; composition of a poem must be done in an instant, like a woodcutter felling a huge tree or a swordsman leaping at a dangerous enemy.

  Matsuo Basho

  Writing, Positivity, Hair

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• This symmetrical composition--the same motif at the beginning and at the end--may seem quite "novelistic" to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as "fictive," "fabricated," and "untrue to life" into the word "novelistic." Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion.

  Milan Kundera

  Fashion, Reading, May

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• I have never done anything except write, but I don't possess the vocation or talents of a narrator, have no knowledge at all of the laws of dramatic composition, and if I have embarked upon this enterprise it is because I trust in the light shed by how much I have read in my life.

  Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  Writing, Light, Law

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