Composer Quotes - Page 18

• A Composer who hears sounds will try to find a notation for sounds. One who has ideas will find one that expresses his ideas, leaving their interpretation free, in confidence that his ideas have been accurately and concisely notated.

  Cornelius Cardew

  Ideas, Leaving, Trying

  Cornelius Cardew, Richard Barrett (2006). “Cornelius Cardew: A Reader”

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• I write arrangements. Im sort of a wannabe composer.

  Joshua Bell

  Writing, Wannabes, Arrangements

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• Have you seen a symphony orchestra? There is a person at the back carrying a triangle. Now and again the conductor will point to him or her and that person will play "ting." That might seem so insignificant, but in the conception of the composer something irreplaceable would be lost to the total beauty of the symphony if that "ting" did not happen.

  Desmond Tutu

  Play, Symphony, Community

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• Puccini - silver macaroni, exquisitely tangled.

  H. L. Mencken

  Tangled, Silver, Macaroni

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• Why does the world need a Piano Day? For many reasons. But mostly, because it doesn't hurt to celebrate the piano and everything around it: performers, composers, piano builders, tuners, movers and most important, the listener.

  Nils Frahm

  Hurt, Piano, Important

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• Even experimental composers, revolutionary composers, self-styled radicals are, in writing revolutionary music, recognizing the music that preceded them precisely by trying to avoid it.

  Leonard Bernstein

  Music, Writing, Self

  Leonard Bernstein (2007). “The Infinite Variety of Music”, p.272, Amadeus Press

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• No composer has yet caught this rhythm of America - it is too mighty for the ears of most.

  Isadora Duncan

  Music, America, Ears

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• If you only do little clusters - three or four songs by one, and another, and then yet another - you lose the opportunity to think your way into the composer's mind, since, after all, most of these pieces are quite brief.

  Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

  Song, Opportunity, Thinking

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• Aaron Copland was a man that had a very specific point of view about what music should be which was that, he felt that new music should have the composer should show a personality in his music.

  Elliott Carter

  Men, Views, Should Have

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• The most important person is the audience and the composer. The rest of us - and even the composer is a servant to the audience. And of course, the audience is a servant to the higher art.

  Dolora Zajick

  Art, Important, Servant

  "For Opera Powerhouse Dolora Zajick, 'Singing Is Connected To The Body'". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. September 25, 2015.

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• The great opera composers were so good at their job, that the whole genre came to be built around the concept of the composer's vision.

  Stewart Copeland

  Jobs, Vision, Opera

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• When my opera Plump Jack was performed in 1989, my first piano teacher sent me something that I'd composed when I was four. I remember I played it, and it still sounded like me. I'm the same composer I was then.

  Gordon Getty

  Teacher, Piano, Firsts

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• So, it becomes an exercise in futility if you write something that does not express the film as the director wishes. It's still their ball game. It's their show. I think any successful composer learns how to dance around the director's impulses.

  Danny Elfman

  Writing, Exercise, Successful

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• My musical knowledge is so bad it's embarrassing. When composers discuss music with someone as primitive as myself, they have to talk about it in terms of senses and emotion, rather than keys and tempo.

  Jane Campion

  Keys, Musical, Emotion

  "How we made: Michael Nyman and Jane Campion on The Piano". Interview with Anna Tims, www.theguardian.com. July 30, 2012.

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• As I get older, I'm slowing down and, yes, calming down in my desire to be taken seriously. That I can be entertaining and funny and high nervous energy can work against me as a serious composer, slowly but surely you'll see me be quieter just so that people will listen.

  Marvin Hamlisch

  Taken, People, Desire

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• Bernard Herrmann was a genius, a great, great composer.

  Michel Hazanavicius

  Genius

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• Since the composer has said everything, if you discover everything, it will be enough and you will be a happy man. Don't try to say it's your taste, and because of that you are changing this or that. And I must say this respect is still there.

  Kurt Masur

  Men, Trying, Taste

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• I always work with the same composer, his name is Ali Helnwein. I don't have a musical background.

  Alex Prager

  Names, Musical, Backgrounds

  "Alex Prager Predicts Disaster". Interview with Emma Brown, www.interviewmagazine.com. March 29, 2012.

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• [Composers] Mark [Shaiman] and Scott [Wittman] are unreal.

  Megan Hilty

  Mark, Unreal

  Source: www.etonline.com

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• Since Mozart's day composers have learned the art of making music throatily and palpitatingly sexual.

  Aldous Huxley

  Music, Art

  Aldous Huxley, Robert S. Baker, James Sexton (2000). “Complete Essays: 1920-1925”, Ivan R Dee

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• Writers are painful friends, and they are seldom friendly with others. They are insecure in the presence of other writers. Composers of certain kinds of music are the same--tormented and intolerant. Yet some arts not only make the artist social but make him depend upon sociability in order to succeed. Painting is one.

  Paul Theroux

  Art, Insecure, Order

  Paul Theroux (2006). “The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain”, p.57, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• You have to face the fact that I have no reputation as a composer; I have my reputation as a songwriter and a performer-and that opportunity came this summer, when I was invited to perform at the Lincoln Centre festival in New York... three nights.

  Elvis Costello

  Summer, New York, Opportunity

  "Interview about The Delivery Man". Interview with Brian Wise, www.elviscostello.info. April 10, 2004.

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• It seems at times I should be a composer of sounds, not only of rhythms and colors. Walking under the trees, I felt as if the color made sound.

  Charles E. Burchfield

  Color, Tree, Listening

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• A whole generation of veteran composers has never taken a stand or provided an example and has produced in the music academies generations of docile workers for the music industry. What can you expect from downtrodden workers who see music as a type of profession, like stenography, and not an act of creation that by its nature is subversive?

  Itay Talgam

  Taken, Example, Generations

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• The three greatest composers are Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. All the others are cretins.

  Hans von Bulow

  Three, Brahms

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