Composer Quotes - Page 27

• The new kind of music seems to create not from the heart but from the head. Its composers think rather than feel. They have not the capacity to make their works exalt - they meditate, protest, analyze, reason, calculate and brood, but they do not exalt.

  Sergei Rachmaninoff

  Heart, Thinking, Kind

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• With the new technology that keeps entering the media, film composers are constantly being placed in new learning situations. Acknowledging this and realizing that one must keep up, I maintain, nonetheless, that the real creative power is in the mind and heart of the composer.

  Henry Mancini

  Real, Heart, Technology

  Henry Mancini (2001). “Did They Mention the Music?: The Autobiography of Henry Mancini”, p.185, Cooper Square Press

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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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• I sometimes think that the most plaintive ditty has brought a fuller joy and of longer duration to its composer that the conquest of Persia to the Macedonian.

  Walter Savage Landor

  Thinking, Joy, Duration

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• It is a pleasant surprise to him (the pure mathematician) and an added problem if he finds that the arts can use his calculations, or that the senses can verify them, much as if a composer found that sailors could heave better when singing his songs.

  George Santayana

  Song, Art, Math

  George Santayana (2014). “Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy”, p.81, Cambridge University Press

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• It is possible I never learned the names of birds in order to discover the bird of peace, the bird of paradise, the bird of the soul, the bird of desire. It is possible I avoided learning the names of composers and their music the better to close my eyes and listen to the mystery of all music as an ocean. It may be I have not learned dates in history in order to reach the essence of timelessness. It may be I never learned geography the better to map my own routes and discover my own lands. The unknown was my compass. The unknown was my encyclopedia. The unnamed was my science and progress.

  Anais Nin

  Ocean, Eye, Order

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• All great composers of the past spent most of their time studying. Feeling alone won't do the job. A man also needs technique.

  George Gershwin

  Jobs, Past, Men

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• What will be the judgment a century hence concerning the lorded works of our favorite composers today? Inasmuch as nearly everything is subject to the changes of time, and - more's the pity- the fashions of time, only that which is good and true will endure like a rock and no wanton hand will ever venture to defile it. Then, let every man do that which is right, strive with all his might towards the goal which can never be obtained, develop to the last breath the gifts with which the gracious Creator has endowed him, and never cease to learn. For life is short, art eternal.

  Ludwig van Beethoven

  Music, Fashion, Art

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• When I write, I fall into the zone many writers, painters, musicians, athletes, and craftsmen of all sorts seem to share: In doing something I enjoy and am expert at, deliberate thought falls aside and it is all just THERE. I think of the next word no more than the composer thinks of the next note.

  Roger Ebert

  Fall, Writing, Athlete

  "Transcendence and the Creative Process" by Ann Purcell, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 28, 2015.

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• Not all, but too many of the best writers, composers, and artists of our time begin to be acclaimed only when they no longer have anything to say and take to performing instead of stating.

  Clement Greenberg

  Artist, Recognition, Performing

  Clement Greenberg (1961). “Hofmann: twelve color plates, twenty-one black and white illustrations”

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• I am an arrogant and impatient listener, but in the case of a few composers, a very few, when I hear a work I do not like, I am convinced that it is my own fault. Verdi is one of those composers.

  Benjamin Britten

  Music, Arrogant, Faults

  Benjamin Britten, Paul Francis Kildea (2003). “On Music”, p.103, Oxford University Press, USA

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• It all depends on the directors. Working closely with a director is the main job of a film composer. Interpreting what he perceives as a color, an emotion or mood is very abstract. A director tells you something he wants and then you have to run back...

  Danny Elfman

  Running, Jobs, Color

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

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• The community of mathematicians is similar to an imaginary community of musical composers whose only satisfaction is obtained by the interchange among themselves of the musical scores they compose.

  Cornelius Lanczos

  Community, Musical, Satisfaction

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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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• My sole ambition as a composer is to hurl my javelin into the infinite space of the future.

  Franz Liszt

  Ambition, Space, Javelin

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• I believe that interpretation should be like a transparent glass, a window for the composer's music.

  Vladimir Ashkenazy

  Believe, Glasses, Window

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