Composer Quotes - Page 26

• 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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• Jerry Goldsmith is an artist who meets all the demands upon the composer in films. He communicates, integrates, subordinates, supports, and designs with discipline.

  Jerry Goldsmith

  Artist, Discipline, Design

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• I'm an English songwriter/composer, working in Mandarin and trying to find something about Chinese culture that I really relate to and respect and feel some genuine emotions for - and it's quite hard, the pentatonic scale, and that, in a way, is why I think it works. Because I'm forced to limit myself to quite strict rules about what I did. Maybe that's how I avoided pastiche.

  Damon Albarn

  Thinking, Chinese, Trying

  "Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett". Interview with Scott Plagenhoef, pitchfork.com. January 26, 2009.

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• A supreme composer can only come out of a musical nation.

  Ralph Vaughan Williams

  Musical, Nations, Supreme

  Ralph Vaughan Williams (1987). “National Music: And Other Essays”, Oxford University Press, USA

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• The genius of a composer is found in the notes of his music; but analyzing the notes will not reveal his genius. The poet's greatness is contained in his words; yet the study of his words will not disclose his inspiration. God reveals himself in creation; but scrutinize creation as minutely as you wish, you will not find God, any more than you will find the soul through careful examination of your body.

  Anthony de Mello

  Inspiration, Greatness, Soul

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• Think it a vile habit to alter works of good composers, to omit parts of them, or to insert new-fashioned ornaments. This is the greatest insult you can offer to Art.

  Robert Schumann

  Art, Thinking, Insults You

  Robert Schumann (1860). “Advice to Young Musicians”, p.14

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• Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.

  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

  Spiritual, Doing What You Love, Making Love

  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Metropolitan Opera (New York, N.Y.) (1971). “Chagall at the Met”, Leon Amiel Publisher

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• The composer does not sit around and wait for an inspiration to walk up and introduce itself...Making music is actually little else than a matter of invention aided and abetted by emotion. In composing we combine what we know of music with what we feel.

  George Gershwin

  Inspiration, Waiting, Doe

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• The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert - in anything. In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again…no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.

  Daniel Levitin

  Basketball, Player, Numbers

  "Outliers: The Story of Success". Book by Malcolm Gladwell, November 18, 2008.

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• The artist must forget the audience,
  forget the critics, forget the technique, forget everything but love for the music.
  Then, the music speaks through the performance,
  and the performer and the listener will walk together
  with the soul of the composer, and with
  God.

  Mstislav Rostropovich

  Artist, Forget Everything, Soul

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• As the eye is the best composer, so light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make beautiful; and the stimulus it affords to the sense, and a sort of infinitude which it hath like space and time, make all matter gay.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Beautiful, Eye, Gay

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1981). “The Portable Emerson: New Edition”, p.36, Penguin

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• If you're a composer, there's never a moment you're not working.

  Ellen Taaffe Zwilich

  Moments, Ifs

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• I often wonder if I was destined to be a composer. I think I decided and I followed my star.

  Peter Sculthorpe

  Stars, Thinking, Wonder

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• The composer reveals the innermost nature of the world, and expresses the profoundest wisdom in a language that his reasoning faculty does not understand, just as a magnetic somnambulist gives information about things of which she has no conception when she is awake. Therefore in the composer, more than in any other artist, the man is entirely separate and distinct from the artist.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Artist, Men, Giving

  Arthur Schopenhauer (2012). “The World as Will and Representation”, p.260, Courier Corporation

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• The Rhapsody is not a composition at all. It's a string of separate paragraphs stuck together - with a thin paste of flour and water... I don't think there has been such an inspired melodist on this earth since Tchaikovsky... but if you want to speak of a composer, that's another matter.

  Leonard Bernstein

  Thinking, Tchaikovsky, Water

  "Why Don't You Run Upstairs and Write a Nice Gershwin Tune?". The Atlantic Monthly, April 1955.

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• Perhaps the chief requirement of [the conductor] is that he be humble before the composer; that he never interpose himself between the music and the audience; that all his efforts, however strenuous or glamorous, be made in the service of the composer's meaning - the music itself, which, after all, is the whole reason for the conductor's existence.

  Leonard Bernstein

  Humble, Effort, Requirements

  "The Cambridge Companion to Conducting". Book by José Antonio Bowen (p. 16), November 20, 2003.

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• It is necessary for us to explain the involuntary repugnance we possess for the nature and personality of the Jews. The Jews have never produced a true poet. Heinrich Heine reached the point where he duped himself into a poet, and was rewarded by his versified lies being set to music by our own composers. He was the conscience of Judaism, just as Judaism is the evil conscience of our modern civilization.

  Richard Wagner

  Lying, Civilization, Evil

  "'Das Judenthum in der Musik' ('Judaism in Music')". Essay by Richard Wagner, 1850.

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• Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky . The glory of science is not in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. The scientist's discoveries impose his own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his; an order that always refers to limited aspects of reality, and is based on the observer's frame of reference, which differs from period to period as a Rembrant nude differs from a nude by Manet.

  Arthur Koestler

  Reality, Space, Discovery

  Arthur Koestler (1969). “The Act of Creation”

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