Composer Quotes - Page 19

• 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

  4 Copy quote

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

  Michel Hazanavicius

  Genius

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

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

  Megan Hilty

  Mark, Unreal

  Source: www.etonline.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 'Jazz Artist of the Century' would have to be a distinctive soloist and ensemble player, a composer, an arranger, a bandleader, and a driver; would have to span all the genres and periods of jazz; would have to have run her own label; [would] possess a deep spirituality, with grace and a sense of humor; and would have to have succeeded against all odds. Who else? Mary Lou Williams.

  Dave Douglas

  Running, Artist, Player

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Magicians are typically introverted; they don't tend to work with others, but I work with software programmers, composers, designers, so it's a very diverse group and the result is always more interesting than something I could have done by myself.

  Marco Tempest

  Interesting, Done, Groups

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

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

  Hans von Bulow

  Three, Brahms

  12 Copy quote

• Our interpretations through the years and generations have always changed, but the emotions, ideas, and the thoughts of the composers are still with us, and these are the premise of the music. The time factor has little to do with it because, after all, it is about human feeling, the Universe and who we are as people.

  David Finckel

  Ideas, Years, People

  4 Copy quote

• Modern European composers...have very largely received their stimulus, their rhythms and impulses from Machine Age America. They have a much older tradition of musical technique which has helped them put into musical terms a little more clearly the thoughts that originated here. They can express themselves more glibly.

  George Gershwin

  America, Musical, Age

  "The Composer in the Machine Age". Book by George Gershwin (p. 386), 1933.

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• The prerequisite of contrapuntal art, more conspicuous in the work of Bach than in that of any other composer, is an ability to conceive a priori of melodic identities which when transposed, inverted, made retrograde, or transformed rhythmically will yet exhibit, in conjunction with the original subject matter, some entirely new but completely harmonious profile.

  Glenn Gould

  Art, Identity, Matter

  "Song: 'So You Want To Write A Fugue'". 1997.

  21 Copy quote

  Show source

• For me personally - because I do it myself - the scoring of a picture is fun. I edit the picture and when I've finished I go into my room and I have many many records - jazz, classical and popular music. And I have this all at my disposal. I don't have to get a composer.

  Woody Allen

  Fun, Records, Rooms

  Interview with Geoff Andrew, www.theguardian.com. September 27, 2001.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• To make good films, you have to have a good relationship and good collaboration as composer-director, composer-editor, composer-production designer-actor because you're working with the actors on screen.

  Howard Shore

  Editors, Good Relationship, Directors

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• When I'm writing a play I hear it like music. I use the same indications that a composer does for duration. There's a difference, I tell my students, between a semi-colon and a period. A difference in duration. And we have all these wonderful things, we use commas and underlining and all the wonderful punctuation things we can use in the same way a composer uses them in music. And we can indicate, as specifically as a composer, the way we want our piece to sound.

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Play, Differences

  16 Copy quote

• I got myself into a lovely little shall we say controversy with André Breton, by pointing out that the discipline of spontaneity, which he was asking his surrealist neophytes to adopt, was new for language but something that composers had been practicing for centuries.

  Virgil Thomson

  Discipline, Lovely, Asking

  Virgil Thomson (1984). “A Virgil Thomson reader”, Plume

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• The most uninteresting part of the biography of a composer is his childhood. All those preludes are the same and the reader hurries on to the fugue.

  Dmitri Shostakovich

  Childhood, Biographies, Prelude

  29 Copy quote

• Many consider that Shostakovich is the greatest 20th-century composer. In his 15 symphonies, 15 quartets, and in other works he demonstrated mastery of the largest and most challenging forms with music of great emotional power and technical invention...All his works are marked by emotional extremes - tragic intensity, grotesque and bizarre wit, humour, parody, and savage sarcasm.

  Dmitri Shostakovich

  Sarcasm, Emotional, Symphony

  11 Copy quote

• What [Tulio Serafin] said that impressed me was: "When one wants to find a gesture, when you want to find how to act on stage, all you have to do is listen to the music. The composer has already seen to that." If you take the trouble to really listen with your soul and with your ears - and I say soul and ears because the mind must work, but not too much also - you will find every gesture there. And it is all true, you know.

  Maria Callas

  Soul, Mind, Ears

  "Maria Callas: The Callas Conversations" by Maria Callas. an Interview in Paris with Lord Harewood for the BBC (April 1968). EMI Classics DVD, 2004.

  66 Copy quote

  Show source

• I always wanted to be a film composer. So very early on I started collecting soundtracks and paying attention to how movie music works. Actually I'd like to have the opportunity to conduct for the rest of my life.

  Alexandre Desplat

  Opportunity, Attention, Film

  Source: collider.com

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• The public want actresses, because they think all actresses bad. They don't want music or poetry because they know that both are good. So actors and actresses thrive and poets and composers starve.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Thinking, Want, Actresses

  "Love Among the Artists". Book by George Bernard Shaw, 1900.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source