Composition Quotes - Page 6

• Though I consider The Chronology of Water to be an anti-memoir for very precise reasons, it is an art form, and thus as open to "critique" as any other art form. Memoir has a form, formal strategies, issues of composition and craft, style, structure, all the elements of fiction or nonfiction or painting or music or what have you.

  Lidia Yuknavitch

  Art, Issues, Water

  Source: therumpus.net

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• On top of whatever else I'm doing, I'm usually teaching some form of composition. The benefit of this is I get to read across disciplines. Often enough that work spills over to my creative reading/thinking, and I reach a point of saturation where I can't distinguish between texts and writers and everything starts to blur and smudge together.

  Gregory Pardlo

  Teaching, Reading, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I still make music. I still write music and I record music, I just don't trust music promotion [and] distribution right now enough to record a new set of diligently worked-upon compositions. I do trust the audience and the audiences very much.

  Will Oldham

  Writing, Records, Promotion

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• There was a precarious balance during those crucial months between composition and decomposition - what the world gained and what a great city lost. Even then, some part of Detroit was dying, and that is where the story begins.

  David Maraniss

  Cities, Balance, Dying

  David Maraniss (2016). “Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story”, p.13, Simon and Schuster

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• Metaphysics is the study of the most general nature and basic structure of reality, and therefore the concepts of metaphysics, concepts like time, space, identity, resemblance, substance, property, fact, event, composition, possibility, etc., are the most fundamental concepts. Thus metaphysics is the most fundamental theoretical discipline.

  Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra

  Reality, Space, Discipline

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• I hadn't studied theatre and I hadn't studied actor training or anything, but I did have a sense of movement and composition, and what the final product would be like, but luckily I had friends who were good actors, who would help me get them, who would get themselves to the place where a good director should get them to build characters.

  Rob Urbinati

  Character, Training, Theatre

  Source: www.broadwayworld.com

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• I don't think I differentiate between composition and improvisation. Improvisation could be a large part of a composition.

  Yoshi Wada

  Thinking, Improvisation, Differentiate

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• Perhaps the perusal of such works may, without injustice, be compared with the use of opiates, baneful, when habitually and constantly resorted to, but of most blessed power in those moments of pain and of langour, when the whole head is sore, and the whole heart sick. If those who rail indiscriminately at this species of composition, were to consider the quantity of actual pleasure it produces, and the much greater proportion of real sorrow and distress which it alleviates, their philanthropy ought to moderate their critical pride, or religious intolerance.

  Walter Scott

  Religious, Pain, Real

  Sir Walter Scott (1829). “The Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart: Biographical and critical notices of eminent novelists”, p.256

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• When things are in order, if the cause of the orderliness cannot be deduced from the motion of the elements or from the composition of matter, it is quite possibly a cause possessing a mind.

  Johannes Kepler

  Order, Mind, Elements

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• As a senior in high school my counselor recommended that I soften my science and math direction with an art course. Fortunately my high school offered a new course in B&W photography, so I opted for that instead of art, towards which I had an aversion. Composition is something that comes pretty naturally to me and I appreciate ordered chaos: the photo class turned out to be fun.

  Peter Menzel

  Senior, Photography, Art

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• I began seriously concentrating on music study after I entered senior high school. I went to a class in the arts section at the YMCA and learned music theory and composition. Today, there are many classes like this available, but this was not so much the case in those days.

  Isao Tomita

  Senior, Art, School

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• Within the context of Western music, jazz has always contained certain radical or revolutionary aspects. These are: improvisation, collective composition and individuality or the personal sound (based on amazing variations in sonority, timbre and pitch).

  Michael Snow

  Individuality, Sound, Variation

  Michael Snow, Louise Dompierre (2010). “The Collected Writings of Michael Snow”, p.189, Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press

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• William Ferris has long reigned as the unimpeachable source of the entire southern experience. His work on southern folklore and the composition of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture have made him both legendary and necessary. His book, The Storied South , is a love song to the South Bill helped illuminate. It's a crowning achievement of his own storied career.

  Pat Conroy

  Song, Book, Careers

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• Mozart began his works in childhood and a childlike quality lurked in his compositions until it dawned on him that the Requiem he was writing for s a stranger was his own.

  Ariel Durant

  Writing, Childhood, Quality

  Will Durant, Ariel Durant (1967). “Rousseau and Revolution: A History of Civilization in France, England, and Germany from 1756, and in the Remainder of Europe from 1715 to 1789”

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• In composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in 15 seconds, in improvisation you have 15 seconds.

  Steve Lacy

  Music, Want, Jazz

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• Obviously a garden is not the wilderness but an assembly of shapes, most of them living, that owes some share of its composition, it’s appearance, to human design and effort, human conventions and convenience, and the human pursuit of that elusive, indefinable harmony that we call beauty. It has a life of its own, an intricate, willful, secret life, as any gardener knows. It is only the humans in it who think of it as a garden. But a garden is a relationship, which is one of the countless reasons why it is never finished.

  W. S. Merwin

  Garden, Thinking, Design

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• It's funny how you can't ask difficult questions in a familiar place, how you have to stand back a few feet and see things in a new way before you realize nothing that is happening to you is normal. The trouble with you and me is we are used to what is happening to us. We grew into our lives like a kernel beneath the earth, never able to process the enigma of our composition...Nothing is normal. It is all rather odd, isn't it, our eyes in our heads, our hands with five fingers, the capacity to understand beauty, to feel love, to feel pain.

  Donald Miller

  Pain, Eye, Feet

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• We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others

  Pascal Mercier

  Games, Play, Differences

  Pascal Mercier (2009). “Night Train To Lisbon”, p.8, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing... My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Philosophy, Book, Ignorance

  Arthur Conan Doyle, General Press (2016). “The Complete Sherlock Holmes: All 56 Stories & 4 Novels”, p.1316, GENERAL PRESS

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• So does a whole world, with all its greatnesses and littlenesses, lie in a twinkling star. And as mere human knowledge can split a ray of light and analyse the manner of its composition, so, sublimer intelligences may read in the feeble shining of this earth of ours, every thought and act, every vice and virtue, of every responsible creature on it.

  Charles Dickens

  Inspirational, Stars, Lying

  Charles Dickens (2015). “A Tale of Two Cities: World Classics”, p.186, World Classic

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• Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of composition.

  Samuel Beckett

  Thinking, Mind, Want

  Samuel Beckett (2007). “Molloy”, p.28, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and sharing motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.

  Milan Kundera

  Writing, Mean, People

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• Most of my music is improvisation, and composition is improvisation. Even if I have a score, it is improvisation.

  Yoshi Wada

  Score, Music Is, Improvisation

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• I did take composition lessons when I was in high school, so I wrote piano pieces. I wrote some chamber music. I don't think any of that was particularly interesting.

  Tod Machover

  School, Thinking, Piano

  Source: bigthink.com

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• Many developing countries are enjoying demographic changes. They have a younger demographic composition so they're not burdened by legacy policy. Now, if you combine this with a good macro policy and ambitious structural policy, those countries are able to move more flexibly and be more agile.

  Sri Mulyani Indrawati

  Country, Moving, Ambitious

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