Best 137 quotes in «composer quotes» category

There was that sound again--snap, then a footfall. She tried to whirl around as a dark form--Dear God--sprang with a splash from the darkness--grabbed her from behind, shoved her under the water.

Sometime in high school it dawned on me that perhaps I was a little different...I realized music wasn't swirling in the minds of my friends drowning out conversations and making it difficult to concentrate in class. I concluded I had a some sort of mental illness and that it was best to keep it to myself.

The Prince stood beside the timpanist to count his rests for him and see that he came in in the right place. I suppressed all the trumpet passages which were clearly beyond the players' grasp. The solitary trombone was left to his own devices; but as he wisely confined himself to the notes with which he was thoroughly familiar, such as A flat, D and F, and was careful to avoid all others, his success in the role was almost entirely a silent one.

There are two characters in me: a doodler and a tuner. And the only thing that makes me go crazy is when they both fight for their turn.

A good composer is slowly discovered and a bad composer is slowly found out.

The terms that Sforza Cesarini offered Rossini, 400 Roman Scudi, were not ungenerous, though it must have been galling for Rossini to see the Figaro, Luigi Zamboni, getting almost twice as much, and the Almaviva, Manuel Garcia, being offered three times the amount. Of the first-night cast, only the 'altro buffo', Bartolomeo Botticelli, who played Bartolo, and the 'seconda donna', Elisabetta Lowselet, who played Berta, were paid less than the composer.

We are all beautiful instruments of God. He created many notes in music so that we would not be stuck playing the same song. Be music always. Keep changing the keys, tones, pitch, and volume of each of the songs you create along your journey and play on. Nobody will ever reach ultimate perfection in this lifetime, but trying to achieve it is a full-time job. Start now and don't stop. 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.

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

A lot of composers I know hate temp scores because people get attached to them.

A lot of composers before me have been on this mission to change the world by getting off equal temperament, and I'm definitely one of those.

A large part of my work has been collaborating with composers; I think we've commissioned about 140 pieces now, a lot of them percussion concertos.

Americans can pretty much sing anything, whereas foreign singers are often limited in style, language, even composer.

Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.

Any subject is good for opera if the composer feels it so intently he must sing it out.

As a composer I approached the drums differently than a non-composing drummer. I embraced drum machines.

Brahms' Variations are better than mine, but mine were written before his.

A supreme composer can only come out of a musical nation.

Claude Debussy was a rare phenomenon a composer profoundly and subversively revolutionary.

Composers need words, but they do not necessarily need poetry. The Russian composer, Aleksandr Mossolov, who chose texts from newspaper small ads, had a good point to make. With revolutionary music, any text can be set to work.

Composers are not all good conductors.

Composers can do things that weren't allowed in the 17th century. Until we had composers like Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Rachmaninoff to break the rules.

Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries.

Composers combine notes, that's all.

[Composers] Mark [Shaiman] and Scott [Wittman] are unreal.

composition is notation of distortion of what composers think they've heard before. Masterpieces are marvelous misquotations.

Did I become court composer through masterful procrastination? Hardly!

I always wanted to be a spontaneous composer.

Freddie Bryant is a brilliant young guitarist and composer.

Gifted women musicians and composers rarely received their due.

Handel is the greatest composer that ever lived... I would uncover my head and kneel down on his tomb.

Human warmth is perhaps the most lacking in a composer who lives his life in a recording studio.

I always felt that one day I would have to make the change in my own life, bite the bullet and see what it is to be a composer who conducts rather than the other way around.

I always work with the same composer, his name is Ali Helnwein. I don't have a musical background.

I am a composer in search of oblivion; and I'm always slightly ashamed to admit that I compose.

Good composers don't borrow, they steal

I am not one of the great composers. All the great have produced enormously. There is everything in their work - the best and the worst, but there is always quantity. But I have written relatively little.

If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.

I am writing something which I find satisfying and which I am prepared to put my name to as a composer.

I don't meet stockbrokers or carpenters or coal miners; I spend all day with actors, composers and photographers.

I feel that I belong to the 19th century. Some composers' music is very topical. It almost says, 'This is about what I read in newspapers yesterday.' Not mine.

I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself, in a sense, in the mid 1960s really, when I first heard composers like Terry Riley, and when I first started playing with tape recorders.

I feel very free and very happy to be a composer.

If there is anyone here whom I have not insulted, I beg his pardon.

If you aim at anything lower that is expecting your audience to be really alert and aware, then you're going to be caught out sooner or later as a composer.

I have always believed that I need a circumference of silence. As to what happens to when I composer, I really haven't the faintest idea.

I just scribbled away and eventually a C-major chord was there. I didn't ever decide I was going to be a composer. It was like being tall. It's what I was. It's what I did.

I have tremendous respect for film composers.

I just have to take my chances like any other composer.

I have declared that I will work free of cost with those composers who are passionate about their work. Sohail Sen is one such lad, whose music in Banjaara has been liked a lot.

I have written six symphonies, they are smaller-scale works. I seem to emit my themes, work them out, combine and intertwine them, and then come to a close. I usually feel that there are no superfluous extras, but probably most composers feel that way about their works.