Composer Quotations | Page 2

Purcell is a composer who had a formative influence on British music - even The Who now cite him as an influence. There's an intense, dirty harmony, but there's a Louis XIV kind of elan and style, too. He had the melancholy DNA of our national folk heritage.

Rather than waste time arguing with a friend and trying to unify our points of view, we decided amicably to let another composer score the film,

Other, far fewer, directors are more like the composer - conceptualizing the piece, scoring it, distributing its musical lines among a range of registers, chords, and instruments.

During the course of a year I work with a lot of different Indian musicians, often in situations where I'm playing more of a classical Indian performance, ... At the same time, as a writer and composer I'm trying to figure out how to bring in some of the abstraction that exists in jazz.

As far as rock groups, I really like Stone Temple Pilots. As for classical composers, it's Bach. I love Paganini, too, the Italian composer who would break strings during a performance and finish playing on just one string. Someone I would have loved to play with is Jimi Hendrix.

As a kid, I had a Beatles poster and a Bela Lugosi as Dracula poster, so both worlds always appealed to me. Horror allows you to do things as a composer than you're able to do in no other style of movie. The music has to be aggressive. You can't tiptoe around. It has to be incredibly focused dramatically - no time for second thoughts.

Bach's music is really some of the greatest. I think, in some ways, Bach is the most profound composer of all.

You're not limited to a song structure, as you are in pop music. For a song, you've got an intro, a chorus, a bridge, a verse, a chorus, et cetera, and you're done. This is completely open to going left or right at any point. A scoring composer isn't bound to any genre.

It's not surprising that a composer learns in detail an instrument. That's not surprising. That should be the first thing a composer does.

I've done a lot of performance practice, Baroque playing, and some of the joy and the challenge of it is figuring out what the composer intended... You have music of the 17th century - it's all whole notes and half notes. But inside of that, there are so many things that one can do, at least according to what we know about performance practice.

It takes a Bobby White to make a tired 90-year-old composer write a song about love.

That's a nightmare, ... Somebody will point out to the aged widow of some composer that they heard a snatch of (his) song. It can take time.

In many ways, a song-writing partnership is like a marriage. Apart from just liking each other, a lyricist and a composer should be able to spend long periods of time together - around the clock if need be - without getting on each other's nerves. Their goals, outlooks, and basic philosophies should be similar.

In a way, the highest praise you could give to a composer like Bach was to take and make your own arrangement; it was sort of an homage to that composer and to his work, so it wasn't considered sacrilegious to do something like that.

I'm into horror pictures because I love the fear of being alone in the dark, and I'd recommend that to any composer who wants to work in this genre.

I hear the name Gershwin and I think of the most incredibly talented, prolific, extraordinary composer of the century, and his music is as fresh and vital today as it was when he originally created it.

In Tin 'Pan Alley, when a composer gets an idea for a song, he almost thinks of a girl he connects the song with.

If you think about the way a composer would go in a room and score, let's say, the oboe's gonna play this note, the bassoon's gonna play that note, the french horn will play that note, the resultant sound, the combination of those notes makes kind of a chord, and I'm doing the same thing with color.

I'm not an architectural composer.

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.

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

The greatest composer does not sit down to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working.

Good music resembles something. It resembles the composer.

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

Of all composers, past and present, I am the least learned. I mean that in all seriousness, and by learning I do not mean knowledge of music.

I think a composer is always interested in his last work.

I certainly never thought I would be a performer or a recording artist. I think of myself as more of a songwriter than a pianist. I'm really more of a composer who plays the piano.

I attended Amherst College from 1951 to 1955. The first two years were a revelation. There were innumerable exchanges with brilliant classmates, among them the playwright Ralph Allen, the classics scholar Robert Fagles, and the composer Michael Sahl.

I feel a great affinity to his way of thinking. That's why I wanted to work with him. He is a composer of words and I am a composer of music, but we have a lot in common.

I feel a composer should not crave to sing songs because songs itself decides its voice. The films where I have given music, I have kept my option for the last. I like to make music and not necessarily singing all the songs.

Good composers don't borrow, they steal

Composers combine notes, that's all.

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

To call somebody a Jewish composer is obviously redundant.

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

Music was not invented by the composer, but found.

I would prefer to listen to a French classical composer like Olivier Messiaen than to the pop hits of the day.

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

Like many composers, most of my compositions are influenced by the music I've listened to throughout my life.

The composer makes plans, music laughs.

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

I hadn’t realized that music could unlock things in you, could transport you to somewhere even the composer hadn’t predicted. It left an imprint in the air around you, as if you carried its remnants with you when you went.

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

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

Händel is the greatest and ablest of all composers; from him I can still learn.

The trombone world is starved for repertoire, that's for sure. So when a trombone concerto is commissioned from a frontline American composer for a top end orchestra, it's a big event.

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

Jerry Goldsmith is the #1 composer working now. He's open to new ideas and always inventing.

The playwright, along with any writer, composer, painter in this society, has got to have a terribly private view of his own value, of his own work. He's got to listen to his own voice primarily. He's got to watch out for fads, for what might be called the critical aesthetics.

The present day composer refuses to die.

Everything we do is music." (Classical Composer)(From: 4'33")

I think it's good for the composer to teach because you always have new students and you have to begin at the beginning and make things clear.

I have tremendous respect for film composers.

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 write arrangements. Im sort of a wannabe composer.

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

To be a success as a Broadway composer, you must be Jewish or gay. I'm both.

If you're a good composer, you steal good steals.

He's not a performer, he's not a composer, he's not even a musician, but Norman Granz is Mr. Jazz.

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

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

I'm not an intellectual composer.

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

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.

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

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.

There are some composers - at the head of whom stands Beethoven - who not only do not know when to stop but appear to stop many times before they actually do.

I am an interpreter of music rather than a composer of it.

Since Mozart's day composers have learned the art of making music throatily and palpitatingly sexual.

Puccini - silver macaroni, exquisitely tangled.