Composer Quotes - Page 24

• I have always personally preferred to think of what is more difficult for my instrument, and not what is the most natural or the easiest. I enjoy the challenges - especially those that come with composers who have written contemporary music for the recorder.

  Michala Petri

  Thinking, Challenges, Natural

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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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• Pandit Pran Nath has given much of his later life to America and Europe and has influenced many of our younger composers.

  Bernard Holland

  Europe, America, Pandit

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• There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between.

  Thomas Beecham

  Funny, Music, Two

  In Harold Atkins and Archie Newman Beecham Stories (1978) p. 27

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• Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

  Ludwig van Beethoven

  Music, Writing, Thank God

  Letter to Ferdinand Ries, 20 Dec. 1822

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• I couldn't say I ever dreamt of becoming a composer, a pianist, or anything else for that matter. I have the kind of brain where nothing is set in stone.

  Anthony Hopkins

  Brain, Stones, Matter

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• Jazz has been such a force in music, that any musician, including classical composers, have been influenced, and obviously performers, also.

  Yo-Yo Ma

  Musician, Jazz, Force

  "Cellist Yo Yo Ma: His career and music". www.cnn.com. March 15, 2001.

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• I don't ascribe to the idea of the ivory tower composer who sits alone in a room composing his masterpieces and then comes down from Mount Sinai with the tablets. It doesn't work like that. The job of a composer is putting something down on a piece of paper that will inspire the person who's playing.

  John Zorn

  Jobs, Ivory Tower, Ideas

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• You can't possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh and go slow. (Oscar trying to talk his way out of a speeding ticket)

  Oscar Levant

  Music, Trying, Movement

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• When I listen to a symphony I love, I don't get from it what the composer got. His 'Yes' was different from mine. He could have no concern for mine and no exact conception of it. That answer is too personal to each man. But in giving himself what he wanted, he gave me a great experience.

  Ayn Rand

  Men, Symphony, Giving

  Ayn Rand (2005). “The Fountainhead”, p.514, Penguin

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• We are God’s gift to each other. Like a master composer, He brings all the instruments together, each with a different tone, each playing a different part, and He makes it turn out so beautifully.

  Jack Canfield

  Together, Different, Tone

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• How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards would be at one's throat all the sooner.

  David Mitchell

  Writing, Winter, Would Be

  David Mitchell (2008). “Cloud Atlas”, p.83, Hachette UK

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• I don't think a guy that really has no understanding about people, or has no interest in understanding people would make a good film composer.

  Stanley Clarke

  Thinking, People, Guy

  "Films Come to Life with Stanley Clarke's Music". "News & Notes" with Farai Chideya, www.npr.org. February 15, 2008.

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• As a composer, I believe that music has the power to inspire a renewal of human consciousness, culture, and politics. And yet I refuse to make political art. More often than not political art fails as politics, and all too often it fails as art. To reach its fullest power, to be most moving and most fully useful to us, art must be itself.

  John Luther Adams

  Art, Moving, Believe

  "Making Music in the Anthropocene". www.slate.com. February 24, 2015.

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• Pablo Casals is a great musician in all he does: a cellist without equal, and extraordinary conductor and composer with something to say. I have been profoundly impressed by all I have heard of his work, but he is a musician of this stature because he is also a great man.

  Albert Schweitzer

  Men, Musician, Doe

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• I have been told that a young would-be composer wrote to Mozart asking advice about how to compose a symphony. Mozart responded that a symphony was a complex and demanding form and it would be better to start with something simpler. The young man protested, 'But, Herr Mozart, you wrote symphonies when you were younger than I am now.' Mozart replied, 'I never asked how.

  Isaac Asimov

  Men, Symphony, Advice

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• Music is at once the product of feeling and knowledge.

  Alban Berg

  Feelings, Music Is, Performers

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• Claude Debussy was a rare phenomenon a composer profoundly and subversively revolutionary.

  Claude Debussy

  Revolutionary, Debussy, Phenomenon

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• There are two kinds of music. One comes from the strings of a guitar, the other from the strings of the heart. One sound comes from a chamber orchestra, the other from the beating of the heart's chamber. One comes from an instrument of graphite and wood, the other from an organ of flesh and blood. This loftier music I speak of tonight is more pleasing than the notes of the most gifted composers, more moving than a marching band, more harmonious than a thousand voices joined in hymn and more powerful than all the world's percussion instruments combined. That sweet sound of love.

  Michael Jackson

  Sweet, Powerful, Moving

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• The composer does not want the self-sufficiency of a richly complex text: he or she wants to feel that the text is something in need of musical setting.

  James Fenton

  Self, Musical, Doe

  "An Introduction to English Poetry". Book by James Fenton, 2002.

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• When people listen to my music, I hope that they will notice that if you take a piece by a composer like Schubert, the major and the minor triad is an extermely important thing not merely as harmony, but in creating melodic lines. Schubert is always walking up and down with arpeggios on C, E, G and so forth. I am not doing anything different really, except using a different system of harmony.

  Elliott Carter

  Creating, People, Important

  Interview with Joel Bons, as quoted in notes for album "Elliott Carter: Homages and Dedications" (CD booklet, p. 17), 2003.

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• The modern composer is a madman who persists in manufacturing an article which nobody wants.

  Arthur Honegger

  Want, Modern, Madmen

  1951 I Am a Composer.

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• In simple hearts the feeling for the beauty and grandeur of nature is a hundred-fold stronger and more vivid than in us, ecstatic composers of narratives in words and on paper.

  Mikhail Lermontov

  Nature, Heart, Simple

  Mikhail Lermontov (2015). “A Hero of Our Time”, p.32, Xist Publishing

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• Every bit of theorizing I've ever done, including my interest in Berg, has come as a consequence of discoveries I made as a composer and interests that I developed as a composer. I never thought of my theory as being a kind of irrelevant activity to my composing.

  George Perle

  Discovery, Done, Kind

  "George Perle, a Composer and Theorist, Dies at 93" by Allan Kozinn, www.nytimes.com. January 24, 2009.

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• The fact that certain composers have been able to create first-class music within the medium of film proves that film music can be as good as the composer is gifted.

  Jerry Goldsmith

  Class, Able, Firsts

  "Music for the Movies". Book by Tony Thomas, p. 209, 1973.

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