Composer Quotes - Page 20

• I'm a geek and I'm a nerd, and I can listen into any piece of music. I think, I can usually tell you what orchestra it was, I can usually tell you what hall it was in. I can tell you, obviously who the conductor was, and who the composer was.

  Hans Zimmer

  Thinking, Nerd, Pieces

  Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

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• The main thing the composer needs to do is it needs to remember that the director is there to cheer you on. The director wants you to succeed because if you succeed, you'll be helping the film. And they are truly your conscience. And they're truly your guide.

  Hans Zimmer

  Cheer, Needs, Want

  Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

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• Be persistent. Establishing yourself in this field could easily take years. Rarely will any composer get that one "big break." More often, success is built on hundreds - or thousands - of very small breaks. When I decided that I was definitely going to pursue a career as a film composer, I decided I was going to beat my head against that particular wall until something broke.

  John Keltonic

  Wall, Years, Careers

  "A Conversation With Prolific Music Composer & Producer John Keltonic". Interview with Norm Goldman, www.bookpleasures.com. July 21, 2015.

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• I suppose I was affected by raw sounds and timbres more than a lot of other composers. Had I been involved with orchestral composing, I think the aspect that would have most endeared me to that field would have been the orchestration.

  Wendy Carlos

  Thinking, Fields, Sound

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• Before writing a single note of music, and even before the spotting session, I find it best to sit down with the director and just listen to him or her talk about the film - what they're trying to say, what they want the audience to understand or believe, and a thousand other similar questions. The director has most likely been living with the film for years before a composer is attached, and so the director's inclinations, desires, and understanding of the film are paramount.

  John Keltonic

  Believe, Writing, Years

  "A Conversation With Prolific Music Composer & Producer John Keltonic". Interview with Norm Goldman, www.bookpleasures.com. July 21, 2015.

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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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• 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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• It was about finding creative, original musicians. Musicians who are strong composers. Flexible, empathetic musicians, who are great individually but who also have a great sense for cooperation and collaboration, great listeners as well as great players.

  Joshua Redman

  Strong, Player, Creative

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• I fool around with guitar and I can fool around on piano. I don't really play either instrument although I can play a couple of songs on guitar. You don't really need to be able to play to compose. There are many composers and arrangers who work out of their heads.

  Frankie Laine

  Song, Couple, Guitar

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• It may well be that some composers do not believe in God. All of them, however, believe in Bach.

  Bela Bartok

  Believe, May, Wells

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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.

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• Most composers and arrangers these days use computer programs and keyboards, but I'm one of those dinosaurs that still writes it down on score paper and still dreams it up in his ear first.

  Phil Coulter

  Dream, Writing, Use

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• I wanted to be a composer for a while, and for a while, and maybe still, I found writing music much easier than writing poetry. So maybe my brain clings to it.

  Shane McCrae

  Writing, Brain, Easier

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Yes, for me audio-visual performance has its roots in my experience working as an improvising musician and composer.

  Kurt Ralske

  Roots, Musician, Audio

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• I was a musician who began playing with computers, to see if they could make some tasks simpler. I developed some "tricks" or strategies for working with audio files, and then discovered that the same tricks could be applied to video files, or really, any type of data. Previously I made many different kinds of music. I did some work as a composer of film scores. In that role, my task was to create audio to match and deepen the visual. In my work now, the role is often reversed: I have to create images to match and deepen the audio.

  Kurt Ralske

  Data, Musician, Different

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• I have kind of an intuitive feeling as a composer as to what would be appropriate for those groups and how to feature certain paths in a certain way, whether there was dialogue in a scene, or whether there was no dialogue and music was telling the story at that point.

  Howard Shore

  Feelings, Groups, Would Be

  Source: collider.com

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