Composer Quotes - Page 30

• Every composer understands and uses the system of notation differently, and that's what makes you appreciate the trouble they go through in doing so.

  Marc-Andre Hamelin

  Appreciate, Use, Trouble

  Interview with Elijah Ho, www.thecounterpoints.com. November 8, 2013.

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• It's the vision of the composer that we have to determine, and not the absolute mathematical adherence of the score. In my experience, there have been occasions where I feel that a composer has not notated something as they meant to have it represented.

  Marc-Andre Hamelin

  Vision, Adherence, Score

  Interview with Elijah Ho, www.thecounterpoints.com. November 8, 2013.

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• One day the 'Maple Leaf' will make me King of Ragtime Composers.

  Scott Joplin

  Kings, One Day, Ragtime

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• The people of your century no longer require the service of composers. A composer is as useful to a person in a jogging suit as a dinsoaur turd in the middle of his runway.

  Frank Zappa

  People, Suits, Jogging

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• Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.

  Leonard Bernstein

  Writing, Tunes, Tone

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• I always felt that one day I would have to make the change in my own life, bite the bullet and see what it is to be a composer who conducts rather than the other way around.

  Esa-Pekka Salonen

  One Day, Bullets, Way

  "Maestro will pass baton to up-and-comer in '09" by Mark Swed, www.latimes.com. April 08, 2007.

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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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• You never know what you're going to share. I can play, I know what is written - the marks, the things the composer tells me to do - and I do it, but it will still sound different each day.

  Igor Levit

  Play, Sound, Different

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• When we look at the arts and letters in America, especially if we look at poetry, and poetry set to music, this dialogue, we have this very powerful beautiful, eclectic, diary, or narration of being in America, being American, participating in America, becoming more of America and also as an American, the American creative spirit, which is quite interesting. Our composers and poets have spent more time writing and thinking and speaking out of what it means to be a composer or poet as well as to be an American, or a composer or poet In America; both relationships.

  Thomas Hampson

  Beautiful, Art, Powerful

  Source: bigthink.com

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• One day I'll be able to relax a bit, and try and become a good composer.

  Benjamin Britten

  One Day, Trying, Relax

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• That is the operatic problem; the singer must keep up a big head of steam while trying to appear secretive, or seductive, or consumptive. Some ingenious composer should write an opera about a group of people who were condemned by a cruel god to scream all the time; it would be an instantaneous success, and a triumph of versimilitude.

  Robertson Davies

  Writing, People, Seductive

  Robertson Davies (1986). “The papers of Samuel Marchbanks”, Viking, 1986

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• What gives Bach and Mozart a place apart is that these two great expressive composers never sacrificed form to expression.

  Camille Saint-Saens

  Expression, Two, Giving

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• Händel is the greatest and ablest of all composers; from him I can still learn.

  Ludwig van Beethoven

  Stills, I Can

  Ludwig Van Beethoven (2004). “Beethoven: The Man and the Artist”, p.58, 1st World Publishing

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• If a composer could state in words what being a composer means, he would no longer need to be a composer.

  Ned Rorem

  Mean, Needs, States

  Ned Rorem (1970). “Critical Affairs: A Composer's Journal”, George Braziller

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• I think the tendency to paint composers or styles of music with too broad a brush - for example, identifying composers as writers of "simple" or "complex" music - has become increasingly problematic and is almost never productive.

  Michael Hersch

  Simple, Thinking, Style

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