Composers Quotations

There's a higher place that I have no illusions about reaching. There's a sophistication and aesthetic about composers who only write only for the music's sake.

I want young Indian composers to be able to do more than just film music. I want to give them the skills that will enable them to create their own palette of sounds instead of having to write formulaic music. It doesn't matter if they become sound engineers, producers, composers or performers - I want them to be as imaginative as they like.

I think a lot of composers get into trouble just making up a plot and expecting an audience to follow that.

I've seen composers work on 30 films at one go. So, eight or even 10 albums in a year is no big deal.

I know I have experience, having worked with the likes of legendary composers like Ilaiyaraaja. And, I've been long enough with my dear friend A. R. Rahman, and we've collaborated on several musical works. All this gives me confidence.

I look at composers and conductors, anybody involved in music or writing or art in general; they got more done as they got older. If I can, I'll be one of those people because what I do is my passion.

Many composers use software to write music - programs like Finale or Sibelius. There are also recording programs. I should say I'm still very old-fashioned, I still use pencil and paper. But almost every composer I know does it the 'new way.'

I find I'm not one of these composers that are, you know, walking along a beach or walking on the mountainside in County Donegal that's, you know, 'Oh, a melody.' It's more a matter of eventually taking that moment with me to the studio, and it begins to evolve.

I grew up on Bach and Beethoven, and now I'm listening to more modern composers who I can't even name. But since I'm constantly doing music, it's difficult to have that quality time to listen to music and do classical stuff.

The record company started as an adjunct to that, to give young composers their first recorded performances; to give young musicians their first debut on a recording. These are all things that big record companies would never touch because there is no money in it!

If you force yourself to write away from the piano, you come up with more inventive things. If you're too good a piano player, as some composers are, the music may become flavorless and glib. And if you're not a very good pianist, you're limited to the same patterns.

My advice to composers is, 'Try to reach 90, and everyone will love you.'

Other composers have taken this particular technique much further than I in the meantime, with the result that the Law of Diminishing Returns has begun to apply.

But still as compared to many, many orchestras in the world, I think you find a lot more new music and living composers on our programs than many other places.

In chess, computers show that what we call 'strategy' is reducible to tactics, ultimately. It only looks creative to us. They are still just glorified cash registers. This should make us feel uncomfortable, whether or not we think computers will ever be good composers of music or artistic painters.

Before I was 5, I did have a lot of time on my hands. I had no job and really no career, and I spent an awful lot of time listening to records. It was more the classical ones, really - Prokofiev, and I think there was some Mozart in there, and more impressionistic composers like Delius.

The more dollars the studio producers put in, the less freedom we have. If the budget hits $100m, they get scared - they'll take the existing score of a successful movie and expect composers to copy it, like wallpaper. The biggest challenge for any composer in Hollywood is to be as creative as possible within those boundaries.

With recording, everything changed. The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one's furniture. It's an idea that many composers have felt reluctant about because it seemed to them to diminish the importance of music.

There are certain composers I have always admired very much, but I have always admired nature mostly and the music of the Orient.

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

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.

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

He is expert in classical music. He knew the composers and knew their lives. He read their biographies. He knew the subtly of their music. And he knew about modern music and all the modern composers.

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,

There are situations where directors give composers directives just to give them directives Just to show 'who's boss in this room.'

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.

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!

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.

Most composers trust their listeners to respond at the right time, and if we feel like expressing approval, we should be allowed to, anytime!

When composers say that music is a temporal art, I think that's true, but what is most fun in music is when you know that there are connections that are non-temporal. You can compare them with the unfolding of the piece again - you can compare the drama of the unfolding with the relationships that you remember.

Film composers are the most prolific music makers on this planet, and most of us are, like, losing our minds if we're doing five or more movies in a year.

This show will make you laugh, it will make you cry and will leave no question in your mind as to why Puccini is hailed as one of the greatest opera composers of all time.

Dietz and Schwartz have sort of fallen by the wayside a little bit, and they are up there with Rodgers and Hart and Irving Berlin and Cole Porter. They are the finest of the revue composers - their stuff is so good and so strong.

Copland was one of the first American composers to forge a truly modern style of American classical music while also making use of American popular music - including jazz.

Composers now just don't have the depth of inspiration for melody. Most of the lyrics of the pop songs you hear today are repetitious. They're almost nursery rhymes, as if written by children - which they are.

Composers and lyricists are not responsible for storyline and casting. One can imagine actors shouldering this responsibility, since they charge for half the film. But producers never ask actors to share the losses. Instead, they train their guns on composers and lyricists.

Composers and lyricists are making songs that are approved by the producers and directors.

An interesting practice in music since the atonal period of the Viennese composers has been the widespread use of a few tiny pitch cells.

There's still a lot I need to do as a player, as a musician, as a sound creator. I have commissioned 170 pieces: that's still not enough, there are still lots and lots of composers I would like to approach. When I see a composer and I see a performer, I think to combine those forces.

There's no crusade here, but I am trying to slip classical music in through the back door, ... I think people can talk about classical composers in the same breath as contemporary music. All music is good music.

It would have been more obvious to go into film, based on the generation before me, but the generation before them were all composers or classical musicians.

Producers have realized that public taste in music has risen, and we are now conducting a test which will eventually lead to the writing of entire modern operas for the screen. When that day comes, composers will accept the motion picture as a musical form equal to the opera or the symphony.

The musical world boasts many composers who marched to their own drummer. We have chosen three of the most determined, and in each case their music reflects the struggle of the human experience.

Aretha is still the best singer in the world, bar none. She finds meanings in lyrics that the composers didn't even know they had.

Any sacred text comes alive in a unique way when it is sung, and composers from Gregorian chant to the present day have known that.

This is entirely driven by two composers who changed music. That being said, if Jim came to me and said I need Schoenberg and Stockhausen, or Schoenberg and Milton Babbitt, I probably would have had a different willingness for proceeding with the plan.

It's no longer unusual for real avant-garde composers to have been in a band, and for bands to be interested in a wide range of music. Look at how artists like Aphex Twin are influenced by Nancarrow and Stockhausen.

It's part of my effort to expose Indian audiences to the works of Western composers of the 19th century who were strongly influenced by Oriental, specifically, Indian themes,

The beginning of the 19th century in Germany and Vienna was a new era with German composers writing in the German language.

Apart from these broader cultural influences which contribute to the shaping of our contemporary musical psyche, we also have to take into account the rather bewildering legacy of the earlier twentieth-century composers in the matter of compositional technique and procedure.

I'm really drawn to West Coast composers and I think it has a little something to do with looking across the Pacific instead of looking across the Atlantic.

I like to start at the beginning and make the music develop in line with the drama developing. I've talked to other composers about this, and they don't all do it this way. Some people like to find the emotional center of it and work from the climax and then work backward and work forward, so I'm still experimenting with the actual way of doing it.

Chita Rivera is our strongest link to the Golden Age of the American Musical. She worked with all the great choreographers and composers and was present at the creation of such seminal masterpieces as The Dance at the Gym from West Side Story when the talent in the room was a veritable Mount Rushmore of the American theatre: Bernstein, Sondheim, Robbins, Laurents and Prince. I hope our show reminds audiences of what that level of theatre was like and what it still can be if the talent, the technique and the passion are there. Chita Rivera: The Dancers Life looks back in order to look forward.

Chita Rivera is our strongest link to the Golden Age of the American musical, ... She worked with all the great choreographers and composers and was present for the creation of such seminal masterpieces.

He's probably one of the top Native American composers working now. He's flying in from Minneapolis and will be here on Saturday night for the performance.

Great music can and should reach an extremely broad audience. When you walk into a retail store, you're blown away; it can be very intimidating to a newcomer. What the digital medium allows us to do is to focus attention on recordings, artists and composers whom we think will appeal to a lot of people, and break through a lot of the barriers that exist in the physical retail world.

The majority of the composers in Icebreaker III are not known outside their region.

The great composers I worked with along the way, I always felt they were filmmakers more than composers. They would talk about the story rather than the music.

And now even composers are proud of asking people to experience silent moments up to two or three minutes in a given piece of music.

The list of successful writers, poets, artists, and composers is long ... As a country it is our duty to protect and nourish our artistic talent, not punish it for achieving success,