Composer Quotes - Page 25

• 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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• The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking "Is there a meaning to music?" My answer would be, "Yes", And "Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?" My answer to that would be "No."

  Aaron Copland

  Music, Art, Would Be

  What to Listen for in Music (1939) ch. 2

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• People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet.

  Witold Lutosławski

  Music, Airports, People

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• I believe that traditional wisdom is incomplete. A composer can have all the talent of Mozart and a passionate desire to succeed, but if he believes he cannot compose music, he will come to nothing. He will not try hard enough. He will give up too soon when the elusive right melody takes too long to materialize.

  Martin Seligman

  Giving Up, Believe, Passionate Desire

  Martin E. P. Seligman (1998). “Learned Optimism”, Free Press

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• If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.

  Simon Rattle

  Music, Piano, Composing

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• Music is enough for a lifetime - but a lifetime is not enough for music.

  Sergei Rachmaninoff

  Inspirational, Music, Jazz And Life

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• Bruce Katz is a spectacular talent! He's a brilliant composer and arranger who uses uncommon and unique musical intelligence to redefine jazz and blues far beyond the pale of the accepted definitions of keyboard competence. Whether on piano or organ, when you hear Bruce Katz you know it's him, unmistakably and uniquely.

  Larry Coryell

  Unique, Piano, Musical

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• Perhaps within the next hundred years, science will perfect a process of thought transference from composer to listener. The composer will sit alone on the concert stage and merely 'think' his idealized conception of his music. Instead of recordings of actual music sound, recordings will carry the brainwaves of the composer directly to the mind of the listener.

  Raymond Scott

  Thinking, Years, Perfect

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• And if I ever DO see [Kenny G] anywhere, at any function - he WILL get a piece of my mind, and maybe a guitar wrapped around his head.

  Pat Metheny

  Guitar, Mind, Pieces

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• God created music as a common language for all men. It inspires the poets, the composers and the architects. It lures us to search our souls for the meaning of the mysteries described in ancient books.

  Khalil Gibran

  Book, Men, Inspire

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• It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful.

  Benjamin Britten

  Music, Beautiful, Musical Life

  Benjamin Britten (2011). “Letters from a Life Vol 1: 1923-39: Selected Letters and Diaries of Benjamin Britten”, Faber & Faber

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• I dare suggest that the composer would do himself and his music an immediate and eventual service by total, resolute and voluntary withdrawal from this public world to one of private performance and electronic media.

  Milton Babbitt

  Media, Withdrawal, World

  Milton Babbitt (2011). “The Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt”, p.53, Princeton University Press

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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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