Composer Quotes - Page 11

• When I finally got together with Rostropovich as a student, he was very focused, almost entirely focused on the music itself, on what the composer had in mind and what he knew about the composer. Many of the works that I played for him had in fact been composed and written for him; he was often the first performer of these works, having known the composers personally.

  David Finckel

  Mind, Together, Firsts

  "David Finckel and Wu Han". Interview with Elijah Ho, www.thecounterpoints.com. July 11, 2012.

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• 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

  Interesting, Priorities, Different

  Interview with Elijah Ho, www.thecounterpoints.com. January 29, 2014.

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• 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

  Ideas, Silence, Needs

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• Good music resembles something. It resembles the composer.

  Jean Cocteau

  Jean Cocteau, Margaret Crosland (1972). “Cocteau's world: an anthology of writings”, Owen

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• You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.

  Clive James

  Mahler, Never Trust, Should

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• I think the seed was planted when I was a teenager, and it took me until I got out of Juilliard. At Juilliard I was just learning to be a composer, but I was also learning how to manipulate computers.

  Tod Machover

  Teenager, Thinking, Juilliard

  Source: bigthink.com

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• When I got out of college I moved to Seattle because it was the nearest big city and still didn't know if I wanted to be a composer, conductor, singer, actor. I just got day jobs and auditioned and took what came and the theater doors were the ones opening the most.

  J.K. Simmons

  College, Conductor, Moved

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I'm a fan of 20th century orchestral music, the experimental avant-garde composers of the '50s, '60s, and '70s. In horror movies you can write music that if it was performed on the concert stage would have the audience running out of the room with their fingers in their ears. But in a movie all of a sudden it becomes incredibly accessible and appreciated.

  Christopher Young

  Running, Writing, Horror

  Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

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• I came across a lot of young composers who have got passion but lack experience. I want to help them out.

  Sukhwinder Singh

  Passion, Want, Helping

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• Tim Price continues to explore and develop his deeply personal approach to music. Through the years his persistence, determination and passion has enabled him to create a stellar reputation as a multiple woodwind master, composer, producer, author and last but not least educator. Tim is one of the best musicians active today and I'm happy to say he's my friend.

  Bennie Maupin

  Determination, Passion, Persistence

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• Presenting Aschenbach as a composer - based on Mahler - leads to some dreadful scenes (especially those in which Aschenbach is berated by his student), and it surely distorts the character Mann created. Yet, we know that Mann's novella was based on a holiday in Venice he took with his wife and brother, and that while he was there he followed the reports in the German newspapers, describing the dying Mahler's progress as he returned from New York to Vienna.

  Philip Kitcher

  Brother, New York, Holiday

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• If I take that person and play them as a record I'm becoming not only a conductor and composer of collage, but at the same time I'm looking at a whole layer of what goes into copyright law, who owns those memories, who owns the way that that sound gets remixed and transformed and above all how much fun it is to actually just mess with other people's stuff.

  DJ Spooky

  Fun, Memories, Law

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com. April 8, 2010.

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• I listen to new music by composers who are interesting to me. I listen to some; I don't know if I want to call it pop, but it's some interesting artist that gets my attention, I listen to in the mornings.

  Tod Machover

  Morning, Artist, Interesting

  Source: bigthink.com

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• Alfred Schnittke was an important contemporary composer, and he lived in Germany, but no one here has heard of him. Everyone has heard of Mozart, and many believe that he can still be found in that little house in Salzburg, which is why people stand there in line. I think that our music and our art belong to our era. If the public doesn't show up, it must be stupid.

  Georg Baselitz

  Art, Stupid, Believe

  "German Artist Georg Baselitz: 'My Paintings are Battles'". Interview with Susanne Beyer and Ulrike Knofel, www.spiegel.de. January 25, 2013.

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• Both costume and fashion are about telling a story, except that in a ballet the story has already been written by the composer or the librettist.

  Raf Simons

  Fashion, Ballet

  Source: www.harpersbazaar.com

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• it's important as a composer to sit in silence and imagine these complex musical worlds in your head, but it's also a wonderful experience to touch your music and to hear it and hear it in the room with you and to say, you can't have an entire orchestra there, but you'd kind of like to have the orchestra there.

  Tod Machover

  Silence, Musical, Important

  Source: bigthink.com

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• I'm a fanatic about Irish music. I love its moody, modal and timeless quality. I'm different from some other composers, because I don't look at this as just a job. I think of music as art.

  James Horner

  Art, Jobs, Thinking

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• A young pianist & composer who has demonstrated an exceptional creativity, in both his playing & his writing, as well as showing us all, his very strong commitment & motivation to aim for high musical goals. Talent like his is rare.

  Steve Lacy

  Strong, Motivation, Writing

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• By the cigars they smoke, and the composers they love, ye shall know the texture of men's souls.

  John Galsworthy

  Men, Soul, Texture

  John Galsworthy (2016). “The Forsythe Saga”, p.306, Xist Publishing

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• composition is notation of distortion of what composers think they've heard before. Masterpieces are marvelous misquotations.

  Ned Rorem

  Thinking, Distortion, Masterpiece

  Ned Rorem (2013). “The Paris Diary & The New York Diary: 1951–1961”, p.53, Open Road Media

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• I was very drawn to music of all types, from Beethoven to Jimi Hendrix. There were musicians and composers who obviously were expressing a vision that was beyond the mundane.

  Frederick Lenz

  Vision, Musician, Rama

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• Wagner exploited all forms of expression at a composer's disposal - harmony, dynamics, orchestration - to the extreme. His music is highly emotional, and at the same time Wagner has extraordinary control over the effect he achieves.

  Daniel Barenboim

  Emotional, Expression, Dynamics

  Interview with Joachim Kronsbein and Bernhard Zand, www.spiegel.de. June 22, 2012.

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• 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

  Heart, Thinking, Personality

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• As a pianist, our particular role is to enter a piece and its logic and create a particular interpretation from our understanding. The most important thing for the performer is, after all, to create a special atmosphere - we enter the composer's feelings and emotions and recreate them freshly for a given audience.

  Rafal Blechacz

  Understanding, Feelings, Atmosphere

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• In many ways I'm an experimental and new music composer that comes from a rural tradition rather than an urban one.

  Sxip Shirey

  Way, Urban, Tradition

  "Sxip Shirey’s Magic Journey: Sonic New York" by Holly Cara Price, www.huffingtonpost.com. July 18, 2010.

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