Composer Quotes - Page 12

• New Amsterdam Records, a new label run by composers, has begun documenting this hybrid music, with invigorating discs by the band itsnotyouitsme and the composers Corey Dargel and William Brittelle.

  Allan Kozinn

  Running, Labels, Band

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• I don't care how much people understand what it is that I'm doing, except if they're players in my ensemble or other ensembles. I just want people to be moved by the music. If you're not moved by the music, then everything else falls away. You're not interested in the text, you're not interested in how it was done, and you're not interested in interviewing the composer and all the rest of it.

  Steve Reich

  Fall, Player, People

  Interview with Joshua Klein, pitchfork.com. November 22, 2006.

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• There are a lot of composers who were fantastic, but I challenge them to write a record that you could play five times a day for two months on the radio, songs that people will want to dance to on a Saturday night.

  Robert Wyatt

  Song, Writing, Night

  Interview with Ryan Dombal, pitchfork.com. November 14, 2014.

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• The music of Gavin Bryars falls under no category. It is mongrel, full of sensuality and wit and is deeply moving. He is one of the few composers who can put slapstick and primal emotion alongside each other. He allows you to witness new wonders in the sounds around you by approaching them from a completely new angle. With a third ear maybe.

  Michael Ondaatje

  Moving, Fall, Sound

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• My mother took me to Venice one time and showed me all the houses where famous composers used to live. It gave me a fascination for music and the city, but also for architecture. It was a valuable lesson.

  Ben van Berkel

  Mother, Cities, Venice

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• It is only by demanding the impossible of the piano that you can obtain from it all that is possible. For the psychologist this means that imagination and desire are ahead of the possible reality. A deaf Beethoven created for the piano sounds never heard before and thus predetermined the development of the piano for several decades to come. The composer's creative spirit imposes on the piano rules to which it gradually conforms. That is the history of the instrument's development. I don't know of any case where the reverse occurred.

  Heinrich Neuhaus

  Mean, Reality, Piano

  Genrikh Gustavovich Neĭgauz, Heinrich Neuhaus (1973). “The art of piano playing”, Longwood Pr Ltd

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• To call somebody a Jewish composer is obviously redundant.

  Mitch Leigh

  Redundant

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• I was in the army, and I had given up the thought of being a composer.

  Mitch Leigh

  Army, Given, Given Up

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• Music is of two kinds: one petty, poor, second-rate, never varying, its base the hundred or so phrasings which all musicians understand, a babbling which is more or less pleasant, the life that most composers live.

  Honore de Balzac

  Music, Two, Kind

  "Massimilla Doni" by Honore de Balzac, translated by Clara Bell and James Waring, 1839.

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• Improvisation was the blood and bone of jazz, and in the classic, New Orleans jazz it was collective improvisation in which each performer, seemingly going his own melodic way, played in harmony, dissonance, or counterpoint with the improvisations of his colleagues. Quite unlike ragtime, which was written down in many cases by its composers and could be repeated note for note (if not expression for expression) by others, jazz was a performer's not a composer's art.

  Russell Lynes

  Art, New Orleans, Expression

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• I am convinced that each work of art, be it a great work of genius or something very small, has its own life, and it will come to the artist, the composer or the writer or the painter, and
  say, "Here I am: compose me; or write me; or paint me"; and the job of the artist is to serve the work.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Art, Jobs, Writing

  Madeleine L'Engle (2016). “The Irrational Season”, p.106, Open Road Media

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• I sort of enjoy being able to hear what other composers are doing and how they might score something differently than me. I enjoy that part.

  Marco Beltrami

  Might, Able, Score

  "More With Marco". Interview with Spence D., www.ign.com. July 18, 2003.

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• I've always had my ear peeled for interesting music. As a student, I regularly spent time hunting for interesting repertoire, looking through music bins, buying stacks and stacks of CDs, and discovering rarely played pieces by composers.

  Anne Akiko Meyers

  Hunting, Cds, Interesting

  Interview with Elijah Ho, www.thecounterpoints.com. October 16, 2014.

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• Trombone virtuoso and innovative composer, Papo combines the best of jazz and Latin music to create a genre that is unique and wild. He's redefined Latin jazz!

  Michael Brecker

  Latin, Unique, Jazz

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• Especially on Broadway, composers and lyricists fretted over their creations, obsessed over every rhyme, every critical chord or interval. The stakes were so high. On Broadway, people were watching and judging, especially newspaper critics who knew a thousand ways to slice and dice a songwriter for the entertainment of hundreds of thousands of faithful readers. There was no anonymity for the Broadway songwriter. Even the best could find themselves stripped naked the morning after by the tastemakers and their readers.

  Michael Kosser

  Morning, Writing, People

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• One yearns unspeakably for a composer who gives out his pair of honest themes, and then develops them unashamed, and then hangs a brisk coda to them, and then shuts up.

  H. L. Mencken

  Giving, Pairs, Honest

  H. L. Mencken (2000). “H.L. Mencken's Smart Set Criticism”, p.99, Regnery Publishing

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• 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

  Art, Ideas, Discipline

  Source: www.cmc.ie

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• I listen only to Bach, Beethoven or Mozart. Life is too short to waste on other composers.

  John Edensor Littlewood

  Life Is Too Short, Waste, Life Is

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• Creative force, like a musical composer, goes on unweariedly repeating a simple air or theme, now high, now low, in solo, in chorus, ten thousand times reverberated, till it fills earth and heaven with the chant.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Nature, Creativity, Simple

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1872). “The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative men. English traits. Conduct of life”, p.59

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• The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the listener anticipates on the basis of a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining. . . .

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Spring, Thinking, Musical

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• I think that being a film composer, someone that gets it and actually applies the music, it allows you to open up a spectrum of feeling. You're now allowed to approach the music from an audio visual perspective.

  Adrian Younge

  Thinking, Perspective, Feelings

  "Above the Line: An Interview with Adrian Younge". AllHipHop.com Interview, allhiphop.com. July 10, 2015.

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• In another life, I would love to be the art guy - a production designer or a maybe even a composer.

  Fede Alvarez

  Art, Guy, Designer

  "Filmmaker Fede Alvarez digs up scares with 'Evil Dead'". Interview with Joseph Airdo, www.axs.com. April 4, 2013.

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• 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

  Artist, Technology, Perspective

  Source: movieweb.com

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• Music was not invented by the composer, but found.

  Nadia Boulanger

  Music, Found

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• An actor and a [theatre] director are both what I would call interpreters of work. We interpret a work, just as a musician will interpret a composer's work, we interpret the work of a playwright. We are servants of the theatre and I've always believed that. We must serve what has been written, that's what we're there for.

  George Ogilvie

  Theatre, Musician, Directors

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