Best 137 quotes in «composer quotes» category

Sincere composers believe in God.

Stravinsky the composer I worship. Stravinsky the thinker I despise.

Still, American composers working in France have had a pretty hard time.

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.

The composers hated me. The singers detested me. The guitarists were terrified by me.

The ability to understand and deliver comedy and tragedy is extremely rare in one composer.

The first requirement for a composer is to be dead.

The modern composer is a madman who persists in manufacturing an article which nobody wants.

The model of a composer.

There are no woman composers, never have been and possibly never will be.

The most uninteresting part of the biography of a composer is his childhood. All those preludes are the same and the reader hurries on to the fugue.

The (photographic) negative is the equivalent of the composers score and the print is the equivalent of the conductors performance.

There's always been good and bad music. Many composers hide behind modern music in order to not make music.

There are wonderful composers and librettists out there. It's the lack of creative producers that is troubling.

The terror of performing never goes away. Instead, you get very, very comfortable being terrified.

The Russian composers, especially, tricked the symphony orchestra into the kind of dynamic, rhythmic thing

The September 11 attacks were the greatest work of art in the cosmos...compared to that, we composers are nothing

This whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, “Is there a meaning to music?” My answer to that would be, “Yes.” And “Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?” My answer to that would be, “No.”

To be a great composer requires immense experience... One acquires this by listening not only to other men's work, but above all to one's own!

When I got out of college I moved to Seattle because it was the nearest big city and still didn't know if I wanted to be a composer, conductor, singer, actor. I just got day jobs and auditioned and took what came and the theater doors were the ones opening the most.

Well, American composers are the best composers. At this time in the world, we are where the energy is. We are the most diverse, the most iconoclastic, the most maverick, and the most skillful.

When I am with composers, I say I am a conductor. When I am with conductors, I say I am a composer.

To call somebody a Jewish composer is obviously redundant.

To make a film, the final big collaborator that you have is the composer.

We consider Monteverdi the first composer of opera. There was someone before, but everything started with Monteverdi.

(From Boulez, an authorized biography by Joan Peyser) At the chapel door he [a priest associated with a school Boulez attended] asked me if what he had been told was true: that Boulez no longer believed in God. I said it was...

You can't have Bach, Mozart and Beethoven as your favorite composers. They simply define what music is!

You know creators, composers, need a palette for life, a color for life.

A composer who can lift the spirit of a million people with a song, is a definite force for good.

A deaf composer's like a cook who's lost his sense of taste. A frog that's lost its webbed feet. A truck driver with his license revoked. That would throw anybody for a loop, don't you think? But Beethoven didn't let it get to him. Sure, he must have been a little depressed at first, but he didn't let misfortune get him down. It was like, Problem? What problem? He composed more than ever and came up with better music than anything he'd ever written. I really admire the guy. Like this Archduke Trio--he was nearly deaf when he wrote it, can you believe it? What I'm trying to say is, it must be tough on you not being able to read, but it's not the end of the world. You might not be able to read, but there are things only you can do. That's what you gotta focus on--your strengths. Like being able to talk with the stone.

As an artist suffering from insomnia and working from my apartment, I had an artistic freedom to explore and create awesome stuff. I wore a robe and slippers as my work dress code. These are the days when creativity is my best imaginary friend. And I was crazy enough to create what people would call masterpieces.

Been thinking of my grandfather, whose wayward brilliance skipped my father’s generation. Once, he showed me an aquatint of a certain Siamese temple. Don’t recall its name, but ever since a disciple of the Buddha preached on the spot centuries ago, every bandit king, tyrant, and monarch of that kingdom has enhanced it with marble towers, scented arboretums, gold-leafed domes, lavished murals on its vaulted ceilings, set emeralds into the eyes of its statuettes. When the temple finally equals its counterpart in the Pure Land, so the story goes, that day humanity shall have fulfilled its purpose, and Time itself shall come to an end. To men like Ayrs, it occurs to me, this temple is civilization. The masses, slaves, peasants, and foot soldiers exist in the cracks of its flagstones, ignorant even of their ignorance. Not so the great statesmen, scientists, artists, and most of all, the composers of the age, any age, who are civilization’s architects, masons, and priests. Ayrs sees our role is to make civilization ever more resplendent. My employer’s profoundest, or only, wish is to create a minaret that inheritors of Progress a thousand years from now will point to and say, “Look, there is Vyvyan Ayrs!” How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn’t, the wolves and blizzards would be at one’s throat all the sooner.

Cowards say it can't be done, critics say it shouldn't have been done, creator say well done.

Wherever there’s a conductor, you’re sure to find a dead composer!

Would you have your songs endure? Build on the human heart.

As a kid I never knew what I wanted to be when I grow up, but the only thing I knew was that I wanted to create things. And then I wanted to be an astronaut. I would paint stars and the atmosphere and then frame and hang the universe up on my bedroom wall. A few years down the line while I was still stargazing, I came to realize that I’m halfway around the world chasing something and the whole time it’s in my backyard. From the very beginning I was who I always wanted to be.

A society that bases its well-being on consumption, on the gain and accumulation of money is a sick and wrong society.

Even if, in one or other of them, I had a particular word or words in mind, I would not tell anyone, because the same word means different things to different people. Only the songs say the same thing, arouse the same feeling, in everyone - a feeling that can't be expressed in words.

For me, a paint brush is the only tool I use extensively in my works, to push paint on canvas and conduct melodies. And that's exactly what Garden Avenue is, and all of my projects after that.

God is the composer; you are the song.

I am writing like an angel

Having renounced his native land, Sanger adopted no other. He roved about from one European capital to another, never settling anywhere for long, driven forwards by his strange, restless fancy. Usually he quartered himself upon his friends, who were accustomed to endure a great deal from him. He would stay with them for weeks, composing third acts in their spare bedrooms, producing operas which always failed financially, falling in love with their wives, conducting their symphonies, and borrowing money from hem. His preposterous family generally accompanied him. Few people could recollect quite how many children Sanger was supposed to have got, but there always seemed to be a good many and they were most shockingly brought up.

In a timepiece, a sweep of a second hand is so slim in a way that it doesn't wait for no man, and that's why we choose to conceive things from the heart.

I'll admit that writing doesn't always come, but I'm totally against walking around looking at the sky when you're experiencing a block, waiting for inspiration to strike you. Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov didn't like each other and agreed on very few things, but they were of one opinion on this: you had to write constantly. If you can't write a major work, write minor trifles. If you can't write at all, orchestrate something.

In many times, after creating a piece of work I want to stand up and applaud.

In major movies these days, the fine details of music, instrumentation and sound design are lost. This is a shame, and it is one of the various reasons that make me not want to be part of the entertainment business. Although I have done it in the past, finally I know that I'm not here to create industry products. Music is more than images, it's more than language... it's the medium that's capable of communicating the answers to the Big Questions.

It is a cute studio apartment that has just what I need: a bed, a couch, a table, a chair, and a coffee-maker.

Make your book of life a musical. Never abandon obligations, but have fun leaving behind a colorful legacy. Never allow anybody to be the composer of your own destiny. Take control of your life, and never allow limitations implanted by society tell you how your music is supposed to sound — or how your book is supposed to be written.

It's a cute little studio apartment that has just what I need: a bed, a couch, a table, a chair, and a coffee-maker.

Many contemporary composers have been building walls of sounds following their own clever devices. But then, who lives inside those rooms?