Composer Quotes - Page 28

• 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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• To be a success as a Broadway composer, you must be Jewish or gay. I'm both.

  Leonard Bernstein

  Gay, Broadway

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• Those who were still able to write beautiful melodies were kitsch composers like Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky approaches true art not in his numerous beautiful melodies, but when a melodic line is thwarted.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Beautiful, Art, Writing

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• I have often read critical pieces where the critic said that what the composer was trying to do didn't come off. I have wondered what the critic meant if he didn't know what the composer was trying to do.

  Ornette Coleman

  Trying, Pieces, Said

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• A lot of composers I know hate temp scores because people get attached to them.

  Steven Price

  Hate, People, Score

  Source: collider.com

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• I hope people just enjoy the music. I'm not worried about any sort of legacy. Whether people view me more as the drummer in Wilco or as a composer who composes primarily for rhythmic reasons - it doesn't matter to me as long as they dig the music. None of that matters to me if the music is crap.

  Glenn Kotche

  Views, Long, People

  Interview with Grayson Currin, pitchfork.com. June 5, 2006.

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• I grew up not really listening to guitar players. Especially when I was studying music, I was just interested in piano players and arrangers and composers; I came to playing in a band from the perspective of someone who never expected to play guitar in a band.

  Daniel Rossen

  Player, Guitar, Piano

  "Grizzly Bear". Interview with Mark Richardson, pitchfork.com. October 3, 2012.

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• It's a myth that you need to understand all the ins and outs of music. The ideal scenario is you have a conceptual, directorial conversation about what you're trying to achieve in a theme and then trust your composer to go ahead and do that.

  Henry Jackman

  Trying, Needs, Achieve

  Source: collider.com

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• Mozart in his music was probably the most reasonable of the world's great composers. It is the happy balance between flight and control, between sensibility and self-discipline, simplicity and sophistication of style that is his particular province... Mozart tapped once again the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breath-taking rightness that has never since been duplicated.

  Aaron Copland

  Self, Discipline, Simplicity

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• I grew up mostly in Champaign, Illinois. My dad was at the University of East Illinois, so I was always around the music. One of my dad's buddies was the avant-garde composer John Cage, so I picked up on that weird classical and eclectic music.

  Stuart Hamm

  Dad, Illinois, Cages

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• The use of electronics is a natural extension of the instrument - it is an electric guitar. So we guitarists have been plugging into something since 1931, and we are not about to stop now. Current advances in technology means we can have a huge array of sounds at our fingertips, and this offers amazing possibilities to the contemporary composer. It is always a guitar (I don't play synthesizer) but it becomes something else all together - more like sculpting sound in real time using metal wires, 5 fingers and a pick.

  Tim Brady

  Real, Mean, Technology

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• Elizabeth Lutyens was the first professional composer that I ever knew. I sent someextremely infantile pieces that I I'd written and got marvellous encouragement andinterest from her... she's certainly the English composer who's influenced me themost.

  Richard Rodney Bennett

  Encouragement, Pieces, Firsts

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• I am proud to be able to claim that, from the age of nineteen, I've managed to earna living entirely as a composer.

  Richard Rodney Bennett

  Age, Nineteen, Proud

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• I knew I could never be accepted as a straight-ahead jazz musician, nor would Iaccept myself as that. I would never be accepted as a minimalist. I wouldn't be adowntown composer. Because I find all orthodoxies, all doctrines to be ultimatelybanal.

  Anthony Davis

  Musician, Doctrine, Orthodoxy

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• It is hard to think of another composer who so perfectly marries form and passion.

  Leonard Bernstein

  Passion, Thinking, Form

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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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• As a composer I could never find use for over 4 or 5 notes in any musical number, and as a playwright most of my plays have two acts because i couldn't think of an idea for the third act.

  George M. Cohan

  Thinking, Play, Ideas

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