Composer Quotes - Page 29

• 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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• You think about, like, [20th-century classical composers] Alban Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern sitting around in some living room in Vienna and being like, "We are the end of music. We are the end of this tradition. Music is done."

  David Longstreth

  Thinking, Sitting, Done

  "Dirty Projectors". Interview with Brandon Stosuy, pitchfork.com. July 2, 2012.

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• If I weren't a director, I would want to be a film composer.

  Steven Spielberg

  Directors, Want, Film

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

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• A good composer is slowly discovered and a bad composer is slowly found out.

  Ernest Newman

  Music, Found, Funny Music

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• Composers and musicians have always starved and, as this is a sentimental country, we think the tradition should be continued.

  Thomas Beecham

  Country, Thinking, Musical

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• I don't think they understand it's as important as math and science. It rounds you out as a person. I think it gives you a love of certain things. You don't have to become the next great composer. It's just nice to have heard certain things or to have seen certain things. It's part of being a human being.

  Marvin Hamlisch

  Nice, Math, Thinking

  "Marvin Hamlisch, Whose Notes Struck Gold, Dies at 68" by Rob Hoerburger, www.nytimes.com. August 7, 2012.

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• I think that if I were required to spend the rest of my life on a desert island, and to listen to or play the music of any one composer during all that time, that composer would almost certainly be Bach. I really can’t think of any other music which is so all-encompassing, which moves me so deeply and so consistently, and which, to use a rather imprecise word, is valuable beyond all of its skill and brilliance for something more meaningful than that — its humanity.

  Glenn Gould

  Meaningful, Moving, Thinking

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• When we play music we describe the echo the tableau of natural forms, their shapes and arrangements, as uncovered by the composer's imagination, which yet must be filtered through our own. There is no other way. And in acknowledging this tableau, this revelation, we must "hesitate", we must doubt, as the composer doubted, for no valid creation can issue unscarred by doubt, by that vast flux of wonder which precedes the construction of being.

  Russell Sherman

  Play, Issues, Echoes

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• What's great about [Guettel] is his very distinct voice as a composer. And that distinct voice is something worth cherishing and expressing so we just didn't want to screw that up.

  Bartlett Sher

  Voice, Want, Cherish

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• I don't understand why we have to experiment with film. I think everything should be done on paper. A musician has to do it, a composer. He puts a lot of dots down and beautiful music comes out. And I think that students should be taught to visualize. That's the one thing missing in all this. The one thing that the student has got to do is to learn that there is a rectangle up there - a white rectangle in a theater - and it has to be filled.

  Alfred Hitchcock

  Beautiful, Thinking, White

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

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• It's nice that all the composers have said that nobody interprets a lyric like Fred Astaire. But when it comes to selling records I was never worth anything particularly except as a collector's item.

  Fred Astaire

  Nice, Records, Selling

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

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• My entire education in music was in reading interviews with bands like Stereolab and finding out about Brazilian music or a Romanian composer. You expose yourself to what people you look up to admire.

  Bradford Cox

  Reading, People, Looks

  Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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• Working with composers often is a really frustrating experience because you speak a different language and, oftentimes, they take two or three jobs, at the same time. They're difficult and pretentious and they're tormented artists.

  Peter Berg

  Jobs, Artist, Often Is

  Source: collider.com

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• I went to Hollywood. I put the action in Hollywood. I watched a lot of movies, maybe 100 or something close to that. I have tons of DVDs now at home. I don't know what to do with them because they're not useful anymore. My kids never watched them. I read a lot of autobiographies, listened to a lot of music by classical era composers like Franz Waxman, Max Steiner, Bernard Herrmann, Alfred Newman and Leonard Bernstein. I listened to only that kind of music the entire time I was writing, even at home.

  Michel Hazanavicius

  Kids, Home, Writing

  "Director Michel Hazanavicius THE ARTIST Interview". Interview with Sheila Roberts, collider.com. November 26, 2011.

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• ...in my lieder concerts, I always strove, when possible, to sing only the works of a single composer, so that the audience could be gradually drawn into a particular creative genius' way of thinking, and could follow him.

  Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

  Thinking, Creative, Genius

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• My closest friends are Roger Moore, who is an actor, Sean Connery, who is an actor, Terry O'Neill, who is a photographer, Johnny Gold, who was the boss of Tramp, and Leslie Bricusse, who is a composer.

  Michael Caine

  Boss, Gold, Actors

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• I don't meet stockbrokers or carpenters or coal miners; I spend all day with actors, composers and photographers.

  Michael Caine

  Coal Miners, Actors, Photographer

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• Originally, I wanted to be a composer. I always tell people, 'I think of myself as a composer.

  Ornette Coleman

  Thinking, People, Composing

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