Top 100 Composer Quotes
#2. Once embarked on a course of sensationalism, the composer is forced into a descending spiral spin from which only the most experienced pilot can flatten out in time.
Constant Lambert
#3. Sidney Poitier and Sidney Lumet were instrumental in helping me get started as the first black composer to get name credit for movie scores.
Quincy Jones
#4. Handel is the greatest composer that ever lived ... I would uncover my head and kneel down on his tomb.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#5. I am not a composer of music; I sing pieces which have been written for me which gives me bigger freedom to search for pieces I want to record.
Sarah Brightman
#6. I am proud to be able to claim that, from the age of nineteen, I've managed to earna living entirely as a composer.
Richard Rodney Bennett
#7. Then the bow orchestra began to play an apocalyptically beautiful canon, one of those pieces in which, surely, the composer simply transcribed what was given, and trembled in awe of the hand that was guiding him.
Mark Helprin
#8. The thing about influence is that any composer worth anything will give you the same names.
Harrison Birtwistle
#9. I couldn't say I ever dreamt of becoming a composer, a pianist, or anything else for that matter. I have the kind of brain where nothing is set in stone.
Anthony Hopkins
#10. A poet must be a composer of plots rather than of verses,
Aristotle.
#11. Aaron Copland was a man that had a very specific point of view about what music should be which was that, he felt that new music should have the composer should show a personality in his music.
Elliott Carter
#12. Who needs to be a Phoenix for rebirth? One simply requires themselves and an instrument to clean the slate and start over, perhaps create their own world where everything is better..
TheBakaViolinist
#13. If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.
Gustav Mahler
#14. If I belong to a tradition, it is a tradition that makes the masterpiece tell the performer what to do, and not the performer telling the piece what it should be like, or the composer what he ought to have composed.
Alfred Brendel
#15. I really liked doing a number of the projects and directors, and etc., etc., I knew about half-way through that I would never be doing that again. It's just not me. I really am happy as a part-time film composer, not a full-time film composer.
Danny Elfman
#16. There are no woman composers, never have been and possibly never will be.
Thomas Beecham
#17. To find a new British composer who is really good is rare.
Tim Rice
#18. One day I'll be able to relax a bit, and try and become a good composer.
Benjamin Britten
#19. If a composer could state in words what being a composer means, he would no longer need to be a composer.
Ned Rorem
#20. In many times, after creating a piece of work I want to stand up and applaud.
Shawn Lukas
#21. I was meant to be a composer and will be I'm sure. Don't ask me to try to forget this unpleasant thing and go play football - please.
Samuel Barber
#22. I felt frustrated by the limitations of rock and the lifestyle of touring around on a bus and playing the same songs over and over. So I went back to school to study music, and one of the things I got into was the Italian opera composer Puccini.
Rivers Cuomo
#23. Composer, sculptor, painter, poet, prophet, sage, these are the makers of the after-world, the architects of
heaven. The world is beautiful because they have lived; without them, laboring humanity would perish.
James Allen
#24. It is true that I am a writer, and I was married to a composer, and I have lived in a small village in New England, but my children are not named Heracles and Persephone, and my daughter doesn't disappear underground every six months and emerge in the spring.
Jamaica Kincaid
#25. 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.
Richard Rodney Bennett
#26. I'm still getting used to being called a composer. A poseur, maybe.
Dhani Harrison
#28. Never ever let anyone take the charge of your Guitar called LIFE. Tune your Dreams, for you are the composer of the tracks of your life. Why do you wait? What are you scared of?
Vikrmn
#29. A young pianist & composer who has demonstrated an exceptional creativity, in both his playing & his writing, as well as showing us all, his very strong commitment & motivation to aim for high musical goals. Talent like his is rare.
Steve Lacy
#30. 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.
Richard Rodgers
#31. As a composer and as a musician I'm a true believer - and this is not to be overly diplomatic - I'm a believer that there's artistry in everything from a lawn gnome to a desk chair to a symphony to an Andy Warhol painting. There's art in absolutely everything.
Darren Criss
#32. Chess problems demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity
Vladimir Nabokov
#33. I am an interpreter of music rather than a composer of it.
Sarah Brightman
#34. My dream was always to be a composer, but fashion came very easily.
Gianni Versace
#35. What is music about? You can't listen to one era, one composer, and know what music is about.
Twyla Tharp
#36. I probably belong to a type of composer of songs who keeps thinking about melody ... I am old fashioned.
Toru Takemitsu
#37. Originally, I wanted to be a composer. I always tell people, 'I think of myself as a composer.'
Ornette Coleman
#38. I'm like any other composer. If you give me five years to write a symphony, I'm still going to be asking for more time two days before it's due.
Darren Criss
#39. George Rochberg once said that 'to be a composer, you need to have fire in the belly, fire in the brain, but most importantly, an iron stomach.' I feel this is for the most part true, and hope I might convey something of it to younger composers.
Michael Hersch
#40. Meredith's father, the composer, who shot himself in this house. Came all the way from Vienna to shoot himself in LA. Escaped the Nazis but not himself.
Janet Fitch
#41. I was offered a few shows, but the money didn't work out, but I'm not very keen on judging such shows. I'm happy in my space as a composer.
Pritam Chakraborty
#42. My main concern is if this composer has been made aware of the fact that I've come clean in all of my cases. I killed in pure hate, robbing along the way. So if this person hasn't, then I'd sure appreciate it if someone would inform him or her of it.
Aileen Wuornos
#43. I find respect for a mediocre British composer, as opposed to a really good American, ridiculous because they automatically respect a composer if he's from England.
John Corigliano
#44. To be a success as a Broadway composer, you must be Jewish or gay. I'm both.
Leonard Bernstein
#45. The three greatest composers are Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. All the others are cretins.
Hans Von Bulow
#46. Composers most identified with the chamber music form are Corelli, Vivaldi, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and, of course, Bach. Of course, Bach. If there is any one composer who gives us reason and emotion, it is Bach.
Karen DeCrow
#47. To be a great composer requires immense experience ... One acquires this by listening not only to other men's work, but above all to one's own!
Frederic Chopin
#48. But Fr Gaunt was so clipped and trim he had no antennae at all for grief. He was like a singer who knows the words and can sing, but cannot sing the song as conceived in the heart of the composer. Mostly he was dry. He spoke over young and old with the same dry music. But
Sebastian Barry
#49. Yes, for me audio-visual performance has its roots in my experience working as an improvising musician and composer.
Kurt Ralske
#50. It seems at times I should be a composer of sounds, not only of rhythms and colors. Walking under the trees, I felt as if the color made sound.
Charles E. Burchfield
#51. I was in the army, and I had given up the thought of being a composer.
Mitch Leigh
#52. If I do a play, it's my vision, and everybody else is working on the production to support that. If I do an opera, I feel like part of my job is to support that composer, to try and create something that allows the composer to do his or her best work. In movies, it's usually the director.
David Henry Hwang
#53. History was an artist, maintaining the idea but changing the details, like a composer keeping the same theme but dulling it to a minor or lifting by an octave, now crooning it with violins, now blaring it on trumpets.
George R. Stewart
#55. As your relationship with the music gets stronger, so does your motivation for playing it and finding different sounds. If you have the idea that you can find a colour that is better for one composer or another, even if it's an illusion, this generates enormous pleasure.
Maurizio Pollini
#56. Damn everything but the circus! ... The average 'painter' 'sculptor' 'poet' 'composer' 'playwright' is a person who cannot leap through a hoop from the back of a galloping horse, make people laugh with a clown's mouth, orchestrate twenty lions.
E. E. Cummings
#57. Creative force, like a musical composer, goes on unweariedly repeating a simple air or theme, now high, now low, in solo, in chorus, ten thousand times reverberated, till it fills earth and heaven with the chant.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#58. The scientist is also a composer ... You could think of science as discovering one particular thing - a supernova or whatever. You could also think of it as discovering this whole new way of seeing the world.
Lisa Randall
#59. 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.
John Corigliano
#60. I can think and play stuff in classical music that possibly violinists who didn't have access to other types of music could never do. It means I'm more flexible within classical music, to be a servant to the composer.
Nigel Kennedy
#61. To Strauss the composer I take off my hat; to Strauss the man I put it back on again.
Arturo Toscanini
#62. Each composer has their own language, and I try to meet the challenges, even if at first sight, they appear impossible.
Michala Petri
#63. They start again as children - all together. It is what the Composer was designed to prevent.
Greg Bear
#64. John Barry was the first film composer I was aware of. As a teenager I owned several of his Bond soundtracks.
Carter Burwell
#65. We all think we are actors, given our scripts. But really? You're the playwright. You're the composer.
David Levithan
#66. 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.
Jojo Moyes
#67. Each time a dancer moves devoutly or a composer faithfully searches the silence for the veiled melodies, eternity is engaged.
Maya Angelou
#68. I'm not an original composer. The tunes are not stolen from other tunes necessarily except in a few cases, but they're in the style of songs that I grew up with.
Tom Lehrer
#69. The opportunities of man are limited only by his imagination. But so few have imagination that there are ten thousand fiddlers to one composer.
Charles Kettering
#70. I hope people just enjoy the music. I'm not worried about any sort of legacy. Whether people view me more as the drummer in Wilco or as a composer who composes primarily for rhythmic reasons - it doesn't matter to me as long as they dig the music. None of that matters to me if the music is crap.
Glenn Kotche
#71. I'm not a frustrated concert composer, and the concert pieces I've done have been a small part of my work. What I've sought there is instruction, variation from the demands of film and relief from its restrictions.
John Williams
#72. The composers hated me. The singers detested me. The guitarists were terrified by me.
Bulat Okudzhava
#73. In the Belgian backwaters, south of Bruges, there lives a reclusive English composer, named Vyvyan Ayrs. You won't have heard of him because you're a musical oaf, but he's one of the greats.
David Mitchell
#74. Is there a meaning to music? Yes. Can you state in so many words what the meaning is? No.
Aaron Copland
#75. Studying Mahler changed many things in my tastes as a composer. Mahler & Berg are my favourite composers even today, as opposed to Hindemith, say, a Krenek and Milhaud whom I liked when I was young but cooled towards rapidly.
Dmitri Shostakovich
#76. 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.
Dev Hynes
#77. Bach's music is really some of the greatest. I think, in some ways, Bach is the most profound composer of all.
Joshua Bell
#78. It is hard to think of another composer who so perfectly marries form and passion.
Leonard Bernstein
#79. In this symphony that is my life, God is not content to be a member of the audience or stage crew. He is not even content to be the conductor. He wants to be the composer.
Brad Wilcox
#81. He's not a performer, he's not a composer, he's not even a musician, but Norman Granz is Mr. Jazz.
Oscar Peterson
#82. I am under no illusion that I will ever be the greatest opera composer in the world, with Wagner and Verdi and Strauss before me. I think my work could fit very nicely into musicals, though.
Rufus Wainwright
#83. What do you think happens to a composer who is sincere and loves to write and has to wait thirty years to have someone play a piece of his music?
Charles Mingus
#84. A lot of what a composer does has to do with storytelling, and there are different ways of fusing music with picture to express different storytelling ideas.
Howard Shore
#85. I think it's very good music composed by a human composer and sung by two birds with two feet and no feathers!
Alexandre Dumas
#86. 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.
Kaye George
#87. That is the way a great master carpenter feels, or an architect or composer or anyone who creates anything - people want to be appreciated for what they have done.
David Amram
#88. Notes are part of life for any composer for hire. There's no way around it. I think anyone who has done even a small number of films as a professional composer gets used to that idea pretty quickly.
Christophe Beck
#89. I usually work with the director and it's just a collaboration between me and the one person. I think you make good movies that way. If the director and the composer can have this common goal and this excitement about making something great, then you're going to do something good.
Howard Shore
#90. Good music resembles something. It resembles the composer.
Jean Cocteau
#91. I've been called a minimalist composer for more than 30 years, and while I've never really agreed with the description, I've gotten used to it.
Philip Glass
#92. My interactions with musicians have been simply that: interactions with musicians. Issues of gender, or anything else beyond the music-making, have in my experience played no role in whether or not a musician has been able to articulate my intentions as a composer.
Michael Hersch
#93. I sometimes think that the most plaintive ditty has brought a fuller joy and of longer duration to its composer that the conquest of Persia to the Macedonian.
Walter Savage Landor
#94. Cooking is for capturing the taste of the food and then enhancing it, as a composer may take a theme and then delight us with his variations.
Fernand Point
#95. Every bit of theorizing I've ever done, including my interest in Berg, has come as a consequence of discoveries I made as a composer and interests that I developed as a composer. I never thought of my theory as being a kind of irrelevant activity to my composing.
George Perle
#96. Music expresses both in lyrics and in tune something of the orientation of the composer and author as to what the truth of religion is and how we ought to practice it
Robert Godfrey
#97. That is basically me, and although I have done many things in my life - conducting, playing piano, and so on - what is fundamental is my being a composer.
Morton Gould
#98. If a composer has a nice wife and some nice children, how can he let the children starve on his dissonances?
Charles Ives
#99. I wanted to be a composer before anything else. And my sister was listening to Led Zeppelin in the other room! When I heard that, it was a game-changer.
Steve Vai
#100. As I get older, I'm slowing down and, yes, calming down in my desire to be taken seriously. That I can be entertaining and funny and high nervous energy can work against me as a serious composer, slowly but surely you'll see me be quieter just so that people will listen.
Marvin Hamlisch
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