Best 137 quotes in «composer quotes» category

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

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 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 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.

Freddie Bryant is a brilliant young guitarist and composer.

Did I become court composer through masterful procrastination? Hardly!

Gifted women musicians and composers rarely received their due.

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.

Good composers don't borrow, they steal

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

I always wanted to be a spontaneous composer.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 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 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 have to take my chances like any other composer.

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.

I have tremendous respect for film composers.

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.

In many ways I'm an experimental and new music composer that comes from a rural tradition rather than an urban one.

I'm glad I won it because when I grew up the Pulitzer was the award that every composer wanted and I was like that too.

I listen only to Bach, Beethoven or Mozart. Life is too short to waste on other composers.

I'm a nut for Bach as a composer.

I'm blessed to be working with wizards like Vishal Bhardwaj as well as many young composers.

In Hollywood, the rainbow hits the ground for composers.

In my years of working in theatre and TV I've learnt that my main skill is not the instrumental playing but the idea of what to play and my interest for so many kinds of music. Often people ask me to contribute to projects when they don't stay in just one genre. I feel more like a composer who just has to play his own things.

I probably belong to a type of composer of songs who keeps thinking about melody... I am old fashioned.

I often wonder if I was destined to be a composer. I think I decided and I followed my star.

I think that one of the things that influences me most as a composer is to what extent I can deconstruct and reconstruct the material that I'm working with.

I shall always respect the composer. If I embellish, it is his idea I am embellishing.

It may well be that some composers do not believe in God. All of them, however, believe in Bach.

It is the power of music to carry one directly into the mental state of the composer.

It's the vision of the composer that we have to determine, and not the absolute mathematical adherence of the score. In my experience, there have been occasions where I feel that a composer has not notated something as they meant to have it represented.

It's hard to decide how to match words to music. It's not like it's twice the work. It's always difficult for me to explain to the composer what I'm looking for. I'm not a professional; I lack even basic knowledge about writing music

Let us not forget that the greatest composers were also the greatest thieves. They stole from everyone and everywhere.

I was in the army, and I had given up the thought of being a composer.