Composing Quotes - Page 9

• My urge, when I go to the store, is to buy everything. And it's the same when I'm composing. My first instinct is basically to bring the whole store home, and not make a decision about how things play out.

  Nico Muhly

  Home, Play, Decision

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• I think if you would like to describe composing as an act with one word, "slow" would be the word.

  Esa-Pekka Salonen

  Thinking, Would Be, One Word

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• 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

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• I'm composing more than before. I'm cutting down on conducting.

  Esa-Pekka Salonen

  Cutting, Conducting, Cutting Down

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• I'm trying to conduct only five months a year, and the rest will be composing time. I'm trying to spend as much as I can out of those months here in L.A., because for creative work, this is a fantastic place.

  Esa-Pekka Salonen

  Years, Creative, Trying

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Let the painter composing narrative pictures take pleasure in wealth and variety, and avoid repeating any part that occurs in it, so that the uniqueness and abundance attract people to it and delight the eye of the observer. I say that a narrative painting requires (depending on the scene), wherever the eye falls, a mixture of men of diverse appearances, of diverse ages and dress, combined together with women, children, dogs, horses, buildings, fields, and hills.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Dog, Horse, Children

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• Learning is available at the library for free; under a tree with a dog-eared paperback; at a job with a boss who gives you responsibility and mentorship; while traveling; while leading a cause, movement, or charity; while writing a novel or composing a poem or crafting a song; while interning, apprenticing, or volunteering; while playing a sport or immersing yourself in a language; while starting a business; and now, while watching a TED talk or taking a Khan Academy class.

  Michael Ellsberg

  Sports, Dog, Song

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• I've always felt that the game itself is pretty much a melody and I am there to provide the lyrics. You want the lyrics to match the melody, because if you are composing a song or recording a song, it's cacophonous if they don't match.

  Al Michaels

  Song, Games, Want

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• Composing is like making love to the future.

  Lukas Foss

  Making Love

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• Composing is a slowed-down improvisation; often one cannot write fast enough to keep up with the stream of ideas.

  Arnold Schoenberg

  Writing, Ideas, Enough

  Arnold Schoenberg, Leonard Stein (1975). “Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg”, p.439, Univ of California Press

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• Writing, playing, composing, painting, reading, listening, looking-all require that we submit to being swept away by Eros, to a transformation of self of the kind that happens when we fall in love.

  Stephen Nachmanovitch

  Falling In Love, Reading, Writing

  Stephen Nachmanovitch (1991). “Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art”, p.164, Penguin

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• I have lots of notebooks around, because one great advantage of writing by hand-in addition to how much it slows you down-is that it makes me write at the speed that I feel I should be composing, rather than faster than I can think, which is what happens to me on any keyboard.

  John Irving

  Notebook, Writing, Thinking

  "John Irving Always Knows Where He's Going". "Morning Edition" with Lynn Neary, www.npr.org. November 3, 2015.

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• Composing mortals with immortal fire.

  W. H. Auden

  Fire, Immortal, Mortals

  'Three Songs for St Cecilia's Day' (1941)

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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, Composer

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• I like to be flexible in the way I take pictures. I do not use a tripod, and I move around in the crowd, of which I am myself part.... I try to preserve the dynamics of the street, and my way of using the camera tries to approximate as much as possible the way we see: focusing on details, opening up to wider angles, and composing all these very short, fragmented impressions into a larger mental picture.

  Beat Streuli

  Moving, Opening Up, Trying

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• I suppose I was affected by raw sounds and timbres more than a lot of other composers. Had I been involved with orchestral composing, I think the aspect that would have most endeared me to that field would have been the orchestration.

  Wendy Carlos

  Thinking, Fields, Sound

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• I don't like to box myself in when I'm composing.

  Roscoe Mitchell

  Boxes

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• I just want to continue developing as a musician. I love playing. I also want to be more involved in composing, doing my own thing, I hope to continue to be in different situations that I can nurture and that will nurture me.

  Vinnie Colaiuta

  Want, Musician, Different

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• I'm always composing and trying to learn more about the business. In today's market, it's more important than ever to be self-sufficient as an artist. I am in law school and that has helped me in so many ways. It's cool to know what I'm signing and I hope to be able to advise other artists.

  Antoniette Costa

  School, Artist, Self

  Source: www.pittsburghurbanmedia.com

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• I love jazz. I still do. Dave Brubeck and Stan Getz are so good. I took a notification course in Jazz Orchestration. It wasn't a grandiose as you'd think but I did have to to go to Los Angeles to do it and get an understanding of the keyboard because the keyboard became my tool and I used it a lot in transposing and composing. All the flats and time values. I spent a year doing that because in those days you had to be able to write your own music and read sheets.

  Gordon Lightfoot

  Writing, Thinking, Years

  Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

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• 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

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• I think of myself of a primitivist. I have never had any of these electronic instruments and I have never had the slightest interest in using them. I use the computer as a tool, simply because it makes composing a lot faster. But I don't go on stage with a computer and make a lot of goofy sounds.

  Glenn Branca

  Thinking, Sound, Tools

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• That's how I always try to start my thoughts. I write them down first, eventually it turns into a poem, and if I feel like composing something to it, then I do that.

  Benjamin Clementine

  Writing, Trying, Firsts

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Composing was more difficult than writing things down.

  Benjamin Clementine

  Writing, Writing Things Down, Difficult

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Our individual consciousness is actually part of a larger system. There are many levels of consciousness, and the creativity used in composing the music comes from another level that is not purely personal.

  Eyvind Kang

  Creativity, Levels, Consciousness

  Source: pitchfork.com

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