Famous Quotes & Sayings

Dave Brubeck

The Pacific Mozart Chorale in Berkeley asked four different composers (the other three are John Adams, Meredith Monk and David Lang) to fill in what Mozart left out,

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.

Michael Tippett

My true function within a society which embraces all of us is to continue an age-old tradition. This tradition is to create images from the depths of the imagination and to give them form, whether visual, intellectual or musical.

Gavin Bryars

My thinking in this was as follows: in all the versions I had made everything that is played serves to accompany and support the old man's voice.

My Mother is Swedish and my Father is Scottish, he played for Charlton in the 1960's and was in the Army, he captained the British forces team. We then moved to S.A. because a lot of players did that at the time.

I think the hardest to replace has been Johnny Collins. He was great to play with. You could always rely on him to be available for a short pass, allowing you time to clear a ball. He would never give the ball away.

I wish that every opera company in America had a VOX season. There is nothing more helpful in making the public aware of the richness and variety of operatic music being written today. The composers represent the entire country. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the VOX season is a National Treasure!

Bruce Kovner

It has been great fun to find these manuscripts and pull them together into this collection. I trust that what we are doing at the school will make it possible for Juilliard students and scholars to delve into the compositional processes of these great composers and share them with the rest of the world.

It is my hope that during my brief passage through this universe, that I may share with you the joy of hearing the music of the stars... knowing that the composer was from a distant place and the songs were written eons ago, which now fall gently on this place for all to hear.

I was a bit worried coming back to the Premiership from America, but I have been pleased with my form, and the interest I have received has been good for my ego. I have no worries about my fitness, and I am really looking forward to the season starting now.

Robert Ashley

I thought if I could get television interested in opera, it would make a kind of new thing that would allow composers to build a whole new repertoire.

Anne Dudley

I think the thing about being a film composer is that you have to be pretty eclectic-be able to turn your hand to all sorts of different styles and genres and be familiar with the latest rhythms and the range of an obscure instrument.

Bela Bartok

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

Anton Seidl

Composers are not all good conductors.

Anton Seidl

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.

Anton Rubinstein

Pianists call me a composer, composers call me a pianist. The classicists think me a futurist, and the futurists call me a reactionary.

Richard Rodgers

If a composer is to reach his audience emotionally - and surely that's what theatre music is all about - he must reach the people through sounds they can relate to.

Brian Ferneyhough

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

Lewis Carroll's marvelous stories evoke a wondrous world and it is important that we ensure enough time for this production to achieve its fullest realization, ... We look forward to continuing to work on this new project with playwright Annie Weisman and composer Michael Friedman and to presenting it in the future.

Pablo Casals

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

Karlheinz Stockhausen

Many works I have composed are only for multiple channel tapes, or for traditional instruments, solo instruments, or groups of musicians.

Karlheinz Stockhausen

So, for example, I produced a layer of sounds with the syllables sung by a young boy and elements from an impulse generator with filtered noises.

So many of the sounds that contemporary composers were trying to create were to be found in the traditional musics of the world. That was encouraging but also little daunting to think that you had to work so hard to be new and yet it was old.

Arthur Honegger

There is no doubt that the first requirement for a composer is to be dead

Benjamin Britten

The model of a composer.

Mozart was the first major composer who created his own career as an independent businessman, an independent entrepreneur.

Mozart was one of those composers who was successful in all genres, and we wanted to show the diversity of his music.

Kevin Ayers

We had literary references, so we knew what we were talking about. We could quote things, talk about books we'd read; you can say something, you don't have to explain it.

Kevin Ayers

These were all middle-class kids from literary backgrounds, joining this sort of train going by, this pop train, jumping on. Whereas the rest of the rock scene, you'll find that there's mostly working-class people.

Kevin Ayers

The music we made then was so amateurish, compared to the rest of mainstream pop or rock and roll. But what differentiated us from what everybody else was doing in the business was the fact that you could tell that these people came from different reference areas.

Max Heindel

Music would lose its charm were not dissonance interspersed at frequent intervals. The closer a composer can come to discord without actually entering it in the score, the more pleasing will be his composition when given life through musical instruments.

Chris Carter

Writing is a little athletic for me. I get worked up a little bit when I do it. So I guess I'm a little bit like that composer conducting. There are a lot of things that go into what I do, but I think athletics really sort of shaped my ethic.

Dev Hynes

I've been kind of listening to the composer Britten and his rendition of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.' The opening track is a choral section where all the weird fairies, who are played by kids in the production, sing. It's a crazy opening melody and chord sequence - really amazing.