Composition Quotes - Page 4

• Is it not the business of the conductor to convey to the public in its dramatic form the central idea of a composition; and how can he convey that idea successfully if he does not enter heart and soul into the life of the music and the tale it unfolds?

  John Philip Sousa

  Heart, Ideas, Soul

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• I am essentially a painter of the kind of still life composition that communicates a sense of tranquillity and privacy, moods which I have always valued above all else.

  Giorgio Morandi

  Art, Privacy, Kind

  Karen Wilkin, Giorgio Morandi (2007). “Giorgio Morandi: works, writings and interviews”, Poligrafa Ediciones Sa

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• Songs that don't depend on composition depend instead on performance - so the fire has to be there in the playing.

  Brian Eno

  Song, Fire, Performances

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• Many developing countries are enjoying demographic changes. They have a younger demographic composition so they're not burdened by legacy policy. Now, if you combine this with a good macro policy and ambitious structural policy, those countries are able to move more flexibly and be more agile.

  Sri Mulyani Indrawati

  Country, Moving, Ambitious

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• Since the discovery of oxygen the civilised world has undergone a revolution in manners and customs. The knowledge of the composition of the atmosphere, of the solid crust of the earth, of water, and of their influence upon the life of plants and animals, was linked to that discovery. The successful pursuit of innumerable trades and manufactures, the profitable separation of metals from their ores, also stand in the closest connection therewith.

  Justus von Liebig

  Successful, Animal, Discovery

  Justus von Liebig (1859). “Familiar Letters on Chemistry, in its relation to Physiology, Dietetics, Agriculture, Commerce and Political Economy: Edited by John Blyth”, p.5

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• The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within...could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the result; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline; and the most glorious poetry that has been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Inspiration, Greatness, Wind

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• Perhaps the perusal of such works may, without injustice, be compared with the use of opiates, baneful, when habitually and constantly resorted to, but of most blessed power in those moments of pain and of langour, when the whole head is sore, and the whole heart sick. If those who rail indiscriminately at this species of composition, were to consider the quantity of actual pleasure it produces, and the much greater proportion of real sorrow and distress which it alleviates, their philanthropy ought to moderate their critical pride, or religious intolerance.

  Walter Scott

  Religious, Pain, Real

  Sir Walter Scott (1829). “The Miscellaneous Prose Works of Sir Walter Scott, Bart: Biographical and critical notices of eminent novelists”, p.256

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• When things are in order, if the cause of the orderliness cannot be deduced from the motion of the elements or from the composition of matter, it is quite possibly a cause possessing a mind.

  Johannes Kepler

  Order, Mind, Elements

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• While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and sharing motifs (the way Tomas and Sabina exchanged the motif of the bowler hat), but if they meet when they are older, like Franz and Sabina, their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.

  Milan Kundera

  Writing, Mean, People

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• Not to want to say, not to know what you want to say, not to be able to say what you think you want to say, and never to stop saying, or hardly ever, that is the thing to keep in mind, even in the heat of composition.

  Samuel Beckett

  Thinking, Mind, Want

  Samuel Beckett (2007). “Molloy”, p.28, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• So does a whole world, with all its greatnesses and littlenesses, lie in a twinkling star. And as mere human knowledge can split a ray of light and analyse the manner of its composition, so, sublimer intelligences may read in the feeble shining of this earth of ours, every thought and act, every vice and virtue, of every responsible creature on it.

  Charles Dickens

  Inspirational, Stars, Lying

  Charles Dickens (2015). “A Tale of Two Cities: World Classics”, p.186, World Classic

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• His ignorance was as remarkable as his knowledge. Of contemporary literature, philosophy and politics he appeared to know next to nothing... My surprise reached a climax, however, when I found incidentally that he was ignorant of the Copernican Theory and of the composition of the Solar System.

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Philosophy, Book, Ignorance

  Arthur Conan Doyle, General Press (2016). “The Complete Sherlock Holmes: All 56 Stories & 4 Novels”, p.1316, GENERAL PRESS

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• We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and others

  Pascal Mercier

  Games, Play, Differences

  Pascal Mercier (2009). “Night Train To Lisbon”, p.8, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• It's funny how you can't ask difficult questions in a familiar place, how you have to stand back a few feet and see things in a new way before you realize nothing that is happening to you is normal. The trouble with you and me is we are used to what is happening to us. We grew into our lives like a kernel beneath the earth, never able to process the enigma of our composition...Nothing is normal. It is all rather odd, isn't it, our eyes in our heads, our hands with five fingers, the capacity to understand beauty, to feel love, to feel pain.

  Donald Miller

  Pain, Eye, Feet

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• Obviously a garden is not the wilderness but an assembly of shapes, most of them living, that owes some share of its composition, it’s appearance, to human design and effort, human conventions and convenience, and the human pursuit of that elusive, indefinable harmony that we call beauty. It has a life of its own, an intricate, willful, secret life, as any gardener knows. It is only the humans in it who think of it as a garden. But a garden is a relationship, which is one of the countless reasons why it is never finished.

  W. S. Merwin

  Garden, Thinking, Design

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• With his new CD 'Tactiles' Liberty Ellman emerges as one of the most intriguing, albeit unorthodox, guitarists on the New York scene today. An album of original, esoteric compositions marked by dense polyrhythms, dissonant, angular lines and an organic logic that ties the whole thing together in brilliant fashion.

  Bill Milkowski

  Fashion, New York, Cds

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• Briefly, in the act of composition, as an instrument there intervenes and is most potent, fire, flaming, fervid, hot; but in the very substance of the compound there intervenes, as an ingredient, as it is commonly called, as a material principle and as a constituent of the whole compound the material and principle of fire, not fire itself. This I was the first to call phlogiston.

  Georg Ernst Stahl

  Fire, Principles, Hot

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• I was very much fascinated with the technology we had that we could edit in the computer our compositions, but all the sounds that were available on the market were crap.

  Miroslav Vitous

  Technology, Sound, Computer

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• When the bus or the plane rolled or flew through the night, they sang songs of their own composition about Mr Nixon and the Republicans in chorus with the Kennedy staff and felt that they, too, were marching like soldiers of the Lord to the New Frontier.

  Theodore White

  Song, Night, Soldier

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• My religion lies in my composition.

  John Philip Sousa

  Lying, Religion

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• A Composition on the Piano

  Johann Sebastian Bach

  Science, Piano

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• I travel because I like to move from place to place, I enjoy the sense of freedom it gives me, it pleases me to be rid of ties, responsibilities, duties, I like the unknown; I meet odd people who amuse me for a moment and sometimes suggest a theme for a composition; I am often tired of myself and I have a notion that by travel I can add to my personality and so change myself a little. I do not bring back from the journey quite the same self that I took

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Change, Moving, Tired

  W. Somerset Maugham (1941). “the Gentleman in the Parlour”

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• The unary Photograph has every reason to be banal, 'unity'
  of composition being the first rule of vulgar (and notably, of academic) rhetoric: 'The subject,' says one handbook for amateur photographers, 'must be simple, free of useless accessories; this is called the Search for Unity.

  Roland Barthes

  Simple, Unity, Accessories

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• I want less and less control with music. Just playing music without any idea of composition or writing.

  Yann Tiersen

  Writing, Ideas, Playing Music

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• Brahma was excessively sparing with earth, water, and fire.... The reckless expenditure of air and ether in his composition was amazing. And, in consequence, he perpetually struggled to outreach the wind, to outrun space itself. Other animals ran only when they had a reason, but the Horse would run for no reason whatever, as if to run out of his own skin.

  Rabindranath Tagore

  Running, Horse, Animal

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