Composer Quotes - Page 9

• When you have great songs that are going to live longer than the composers, everything you can do to bring those different elements and nuances out, serve the song

  Michael Bolton

  Song, Different, Elements

  11 Copy quote

• Today each composer is not only involved in aesthetics, but he's actually trying to create his own language.

  Leo Ornstein

  Trying, Today, Language

  9 Copy quote

• A hundred years ago, of course, the question that the German Composers' Co-operative asked itself sounded a lot more fundamental: How do you create a fair share for those who ensure that works can actually be performed at all?

  Johannes Rau

  Years, Fundamentals, Share

  8 Copy quote

• The composers could no longer direct all performances in person, and so the responsibility of interpreting their works in the spirit in which they had been conceived was placed upon conductors.

  Anton Seidl

  Responsibility, Spirit, Performances

  Anton Seidl (2014). “On Conducting”, p.100, Parrot Press

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Composers are the only people who can hear good music above bad sounds.

  John Philip Sousa

  People, Sound

  9 Copy quote

• Do you know that my very first experience as a composer was a 'Concerto for Accordion?

  Alfred Schnittke

  Firsts, Accordions, Knows

  8 Copy quote

• After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

  Aldous Huxley

  Motivational, Music, Wisdom

  Music at Night (1931) p. 17

  92 Copy quote

  Show source

• A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.

  Leopold Stokowski

  Inspirational, Music, Art

  Leopold Stokowski's address to an audience at Carnegie Hall, as quoted in The New York Times, May 11, 1967.

  90 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  Glenn Gould

  Life, Music, Being Alone

  84 Copy quote

• Opinion in all parts of the world would agree that Rachmaninoff is the most complete of living masters of the instrument; his technique is comprehensive, and he is, of course, musical to his bone's marrow. Most important of all, he is a composer, and for this reason he is able to approach a work as none of his pianist contemporaries can approach one - that is, from the inside, as an organic and felt creative process.

  Sergei Rachmaninoff

  Creative, Musical, Important

  85 Copy quote

• I could create music that sounded as strange as any electronic music, because you see, my opinion about electronic music is that the real composer is the guy who invented the instrument. Pressing buttons is not composing. Composing is about creating something.

  Glenn Branca

  Real, Creating, Guy

  Source: pitchfork.com

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• What do you think happens to a composer who is sincere and loves to write and has to wait thirty years to have someone play a piece of his music?

  Charles Mingus

  Writing, Thinking, Expression

  "Setting the Tempo: Fifty Years of Great Jazz Liner Notes". Book by Tom Piazza, 1996.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• To spend any time with someone who is among the top five film composers of the last 50 years is pure gold dust. I mean, not necessarily stylistically, because everyone is different in what their music sounds like, but the approach and how to look at a film, how to think about a film, how to decide what you want to do, how to think about characters, how to think about art, how to think about narrative, how to liaise with producers, how to liaise with directors.

  Henry Jackman

  Art, Character, Mean

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Who can forget the music of the French composer Germaine Tailleferre? These are just a few composers whose aesthetic ideals we all share, and there are many more women creators writing stunning and exciting music, and I wish I had space to list them all!

  Barbara Harbach

  Writing, Wish, Forget

  Source: www.barbaraharbach.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• In any case, once you're dealing on a nonverbal level, ambiguity is unavoidable. But it's the ambiguity of all art, of a fine piece of music or a painting - you don't need written instructions by the composer or painter accompanying such works to 'explain' them. “Explaining” them contributes nothing but a superficial 'cultural' value which has no value except for critics and teachers who have to earn a living.

  Stanley Kubrick

  Teacher, Art, Needs

  18 Copy quote

• The composer makes plans, music laughs.

  Morton Feldman

  Laughing, Plans

  Morton Feldman (2000). “Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman”

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• A composer's job involves the decoration of fragments of time.

  Frank Zappa

  Jobs, Fragments, Decoration

  Frank Zappa, Peter Occhiogrosso (1990). “Real Frank Zappa Book”, p.193, Simon and Schuster

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• If you're the sort of person that likes a job where once you know what you're doing you can keep doing what you're doing, don't ever become a film composer.

  Henry Jackman

  Jobs, Doing You, Likes

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• As a young composer I had a particular fondness for Liszt's Beethoven Symphony arrangements for the piano, and to this day I enjoy playing non-piano music at the piano.

  Michael Hersch

  Symphony, Piano, Young

  4 Copy quote

• I usually work with the director and it's just a collaboration between me and the one person. I think you make good movies that way. If the director and the composer can have this common goal and this excitement about making something great, then you're going to do something good.

  Howard Shore

  Thinking, Goal, Good Movie

  Source: collider.com

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I had great inspiration from a Japanese composer named Toru Takemitsu. He wrote over 90 film scores and a lot of concert music, a lot of classical music, and he gave me a lot of inspiration, as well as composers from other countries.

  Howard Shore

  Country, Inspiration, Film

  Source: collider.com

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• Composers don't just sit in a room and write things that are in their heads, they actually listen to a lot of music, pop music, jazz, rock and roll, any combination of music that catches their ear.

  Hilary Hahn

  Writing, Rocks, Rock And Roll

  Source: www.pbs.org

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• Every orchestra I know, every opera house I know, is desperately looking around trying to find new talent, new composing talent, supporting young composers, supporting new ideas, supporting new ways of getting the message across.

  Esa-Pekka Salonen

  Ideas, House, Trying

  Source: www.pbs.org

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• I'm not an original composer. The tunes are not stolen from other tunes necessarily except in a few cases, but they're in the style of songs that I grew up with.

  Tom Lehrer

  Song, Style, Tunes

  "The Music Show" with Andrew Ford, www.abc.net.au. July 8, 2006.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I was starting a group of musicians and we had a group of young composers in Finland back in the '70s, and the real conductors, the professional conductors at the time were not interested in our stuff.

  Esa-Pekka Salonen

  Real, Musician, Groups

  Source: www.pbs.org

  4 Copy quote

  Show source