Composing Quotes

• Composing a piece of music is very feminine. It is sensitive, emotional, contemplative. By comparison, doing housework is positively masculine.

  Barbara Kolb

  Emotional, Pieces, Sensitive

  59 Copy quote

• I am composing like a god, as if it simply had to be done as it has been done.

  Franz Schubert

  Done, Has Beens, Ifs

  44 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

  79 Copy quote

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• Works of art make rules but rules do not make works of art.

  Claude Debussy

  Art, Musician, Classical Music

  "Companion to Contemporary Musical Thought". Book by John Paynter, 1992.

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• If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.

  Gustav Mahler

  Funny, Music, Expression

  Letter to Max Marschalk, March 26, 1896.

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• Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.

  Ludwig van Beethoven

  Music, Wisdom, Philosophy

  Ludwig van Beethoven, Friedrich Kerst, Henry Edward Krehbiel (1964). “Beethoven, the Man and the Artist, as Revealed in His Own Words”, p.13, Courier Corporation

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• 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.

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• The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

  T. S. Eliot

  Funny, Work, Reading

  19 Copy quote

• What I wanted and what I visualized while composing has not always been realized.

  Gustav Mahler

  Wanted

  16 Copy quote

• However, I began composing as soon as I started taking piano lessons.

  Gyorgy Ligeti

  Piano, Lessons, Piano Lesson

  15 Copy quote

• There will have to be times when I'm not conducting because I'm composing. I haven't solved that problem, and perhaps I never will.

  Esa-Pekka Salonen

  Problem, Conducting, Havens

  15 Copy quote

• There are people who must spend huge amounts of time composing these online diatribes against me, all about how disgusting and terrible I am and how no one should ever read my books, and it's not enough for them to hate me, they can't stand the fact that ANYONE likes me!

  Poppy Z. Brite

  Hate, Book, People

  15 Copy quote

• There is nothing greater than the joy of composing something oneself and then listening to it.

  Clara Schumann

  Joy, Listening, Oneself

  25 Copy quote

• I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.

  Gordon Getty

  Paris, Piano, Bookstores

  17 Copy quote

• Being in the studio is okay but sitting in a room by yourself composing is a discipline that takes a certain type of mind set and Tommy has a great gift for that as did the previous guy.

  James Young

  Discipline, Guy, Mind

  15 Copy quote

• I began composing works which were imitative of the music I was being told about. I was also very interested in translating the music into visual terms.

  Henry Flynt

  Artist, Term, Translate

  15 Copy quote

• My kind of composing is more like the work of a gardener. The gardener takes his seeds and scatters them, knowing what he is planting but not quite what will grow where and when - and he won't necessarily be able to reproduce it again afterwards either.

  Brian Eno

  Knowing, Able, Kind

  15 Copy quote

• The songs of Bizet are by a French peer of Rossini. When Rossini stopped composing, he was living in Paris. He also wrote some beautiful songs in French.

  Cecilia Bartoli

  Beautiful, Song, Paris

  52 Copy quote

• Composing is like driving down a foggy road toward a house. Slowly you see more details of the house-the color of the slates and bricks, the shape of the windows. The notes are the bricks and the mortar of the house.

  Benjamin Britten

  Bricks And Mortar, Fog, Color

  "The Classical Music Experience: Discover the Music of the World's Greatest Composers". Book by Julius H. Jacobson (p.341), 2008.

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• Since age seven, I've been composing and have never stopped composing, yet, the creative process is as elusive to me as it has ever been.

  Lukas Foss

  Creative, Age, Seven

  17 Copy quote

• While it is true that Frank had a great sense of humor, he was also very serious about composing music. In reality there are only a handful of skilled players who can play his most complex pieces. It takes a lot of patience to learn and requires a fantastic memory.

  Dweezil Zappa

  Patience, Memories, Humor

  18 Copy quote

• You might lose your spontaneity and, instead of composing first-rate Gershwin, end up with second rate Ravel.

  Maurice Ravel

  Ravel, Might, Firsts

  18 Copy quote

• A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.

  Frank Zappa

  Music, Writing, Air

  Frank Zappa, Peter Occhiogrosso (1990). “Real Frank Zappa Book”, p.162, Simon and Schuster

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• The most interesting aspect for me, composing exclusively with patterns, is that there is not one organizational procedure more advantageous than another, perhaps because no one pattern ever takes precedence over the others

  Morton Feldman

  Interesting, Patterns, Procedures

  Morton Feldman (1985). “Essays”

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• Film composing is a splendid discipline, and I recommend a course of it to all composition teachers whose pupils are apt to be dawdling in their ideas, or whose every bar is sacred and must not be cut or altered.

  Ralph Vaughan Williams

  Teacher, Cutting, Ideas

  Ralph Vaughan Williams (1987). “National Music: And Other Essays”, Oxford University Press, USA

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