Top 100 Composer Quotes
#1. When I listen to a symphony I love, I don't get from it what the composer got. His 'Yes' was different from mine. He could have no concern for mine and no exact conception of it. That answer is too personal to each man. But in giving himself what he wanted, he gave me a great experience.
Ayn Rand
#2. I'm trying to interpret the film through the director's head, but it all comes out through me. So, a composer is kind of like a psychic medium.
Danny Elfman
#3. Did I become court composer through masterful procrastination? Hardly!
Rachel Hartman
#4. As a composer I could never find use for over 4 or 5 notes in any musical number, and as a playwright most of my plays have two acts because i couldn't think of an idea for the third act.
George M. Cohan
#5. The music critic, Huneber, could never quite make up his mind about a new symphony until he had seen the composer's mistress.
H.L. Mencken
#6. I make me. At 18, I decided I wasn't going to have an unconstructed self ever. I was going to be the composer, the designer, the architect of me. It's been really fun.
Patch Adams
#7. I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First to discourage the composer from writing any more and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven.
Jascha Heifetz
#8. I would prefer to listen to a French classical composer like Olivier Messiaen than to the pop hits of the day.
Matt Groening
#9. I had great inspiration from a Japanese composer named Toru Takemitsu. He wrote over 90 film scores and a lot of concert music, a lot of classical music, and he gave me a lot of inspiration, as well as composers from other countries.
Howard Shore
#10. With the new technology that keeps entering the media, film composers are constantly being placed in new learning situations. Acknowledging this and realizing that one must keep up, I maintain, nonetheless, that the real creative power is in the mind and heart of the composer.
Henry Mancini
#11. Americans can pretty much sing anything, whereas foreign singers are often limited in style, language, even composer.
Marilyn Horne
#12. You'll know if you're a famous composer if 20 years from now your name appears on a pull-down menu in Band in a Box, alongside Hans Zimmer.
Cliff Martinez
#13. That was my challenge as a composer. Like with anything, to keep yourself interested in doing what you do, you set yourself challenges. So I said, Okay, I'll try to write a hundred tunes in a year.
John Zorn
#14. SONG. . . . BY TOAD. (Composed by himself.) OTHER COMPOSITIONS. BY TOAD will be sung in the course of the evening by the. . . COMPOSER.
Kenneth Grahame
#15. 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.
Chris Carter
#16. In my next lifetime, I want to come back as a composer.
Bob Fosse
#17. Because I have sixty years of being a professional composer, conductor, musician, whatever, and you develop a lot of friendships and you get involved with a lot of sort of long-term commitments and obligations.
Gunther Schuller
#18. 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.
Sonu Nigam
#19. 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.
Samuel Barber
#20. If you only do little clusters - three or four songs by one, and another, and then yet another - you lose the opportunity to think your way into the composer's mind, since, after all, most of these pieces are quite brief.
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau
#21. I am a ham. I've no business being rock 'n' roll. I've said it over and over again that I'm a classical composer, dishevelling my personality by dabbling in rock 'n' roll.
John Cale
#22. When you think about a composer you know like Wagner or Pier Boulez or something like that most of the issues a composer is working with are about discreet, notated music that someone else will play.
DJ Spooky
#23. 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.
John Corigliano
#24. Historically, there is a fight between the sound designer and the composer. You see them in the mixing room and they're always fighting because the composer wants the music to be heard and the sound designer wants the sound to be heard.
Alfonso Cuaron
#25. I think that if I were required to spend the rest of my life on a desert island, and to listen to or play the music of any one composer during all that time, that composer would almost certainly be Bach.
Glenn Gould
#26. It's funny because as a composer, you want to hear your songs live on. I think a lot of times people will create a song and it becomes stagnant or something that they're no longer interested in playing, and they leave it alone.
Christian Scott
#27. A good composer is slowly discovered and a bad composer is slowly found out.
Ernest Newman
#28. 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.
Marc-Andre Hamelin
#29. I think the seed was planted when I was a teenager, and it took me until I got out of Juilliard. At Juilliard I was just learning to be a composer, but I was also learning how to manipulate computers.
Tod Machover
#30. A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.
Frank Zappa
#31. I am writing something which I find satisfying and which I am prepared to put my name to as a composer.
Gavin Bryars
#32. The most uninteresting part of the biography of a composer is his childhood. All those preludes are the same and the reader hurries on to the fugue.
Dmitri Shostakovich
#33. An artist, as much as a writer or composer, needed themes, needed ideas.
Hanya Yanagihara
#34. I like a composer called Henry Purcell, and I love to listen to Neil Young.
Cornelia Funke
#35. To me, all writing is like music. And especially dialogue. I studied music in college; that is what I wanted to be, a composer. Acting got me sidetracked.
Dirk Benedict
#36. Love is the keynote, Joy is the music, Knowledge is the performer, the Infinite All is the composer and audience.
Sri Aurobindo
#37. She seemed to have apprehended all of the composer's coldness and none of his poetry.
Kate Chopin
#38. I'm a composer, and therefore I know when I've written a good tune. When you've written a good song is when you know that the lyric is completely coalesced with the song.
Andrew Lloyd Webber
#39. In film, I was surprised when I first saw the movie 'Drive.' I said, 'Oh, God. It sounds great - I love it. Wow, this could be the soundtrack from 'American Gigolo' or 'Cat People.' But I'm surprised that the director would agree with a composer to write that kind of sound.
Giorgio Moroder
#42. One yearns unspeakably for a composer who gives out his pair of honest themes, and then develops them unashamed, and then hangs a brisk coda to them, and then shuts up.
H.L. Mencken
#43. When you're making video, you're giving structure to time, which is what a composer does.
Bill Viola
#44. My primary calling, I always knew since the age of 11, was as a composer, and so that had to take priority.
Gunther Schuller
#45. As a composer, I know that all sorts of sounds I hear are making their way into my brain and soul and later sneak into my music.
Eric Whitacre
#46. With a musical, you kind of have to do a mind-meld with the book-writer, the lyricist, the composer, the director - sometimes the producer. I think that's a reason why musicals are the hardest form.
David Henry Hwang
#47. I've been a full-time composer for many years, and I'm still learning all the time. There is always more than one musical "solution" to each movie scene, but my goal is to compose music that works perfectly for the director, and me!
John Keltonic
#48. It's nice to have a great female composer in the program and add her color.
Cecilia Bartoli
#49. You never know what you're going to share. I can play, I know what is written - the marks, the things the composer tells me to do - and I do it, but it will still sound different each day.
Igor Levit
#50. I'm really grateful. But I never had the rock star dream. I thought it would be cool to be a modern-day composer.
Julian Casablancas
#51. I wanted to be a composer for a while, and for a while, and maybe still, I found writing music much easier than writing poetry. So maybe my brain clings to it.
Shane McCrae
#52. Intent is in the composer, interpretation is in the conductor, rendering is in the instrumentalist, perception is in the listener, sound is in the notes, and rhythm is in the intervals. Music is the harmonious relationship between them all. Relationship is beauty.
Dee Hock
#53. A composer once told me that the silence from which each note emerges is more important than the note itself.
Wayne W. Dyer
#54. If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void.
Levi-Strauss
#55. To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan, and not quite enough time. - Leonard Bernstein, composer
Meg Jay
#56. I'm not a great guitarist, but I do bits and bobs. I'm mainly a songwriter and a composer. I've done a lot of scoring and some stuff for British pop music that did pretty well, but I've mainly been working on my own stuff with Duncan Sheik.
Matthew James Thomas
#57. I just wanted to be a composer; I became an actor by default, really. I got a scholarship to a college of music and drama, hoping to take a scholarship in music. But I ended up as an acting student, so I've stuck with that for the last 50-odd years.
Anthony Hopkins
#58. The composer must bear in mind that the radio listener does not hear music directly. He hears it only after the sound has passed through a microphone, amplifiers, transmission lines, radio transmitter, receiving set, and, finally, the loud speaker apparatus itself.
Raymond Scott
#59. One of my heroes is a composer named James Bernard, and oh my God ... I can still listen to his music today and be stirred and moved by it. But I think that you fall in love with ... Well, again, when you're young, it really is more powerful. Much more terrifying.
John Carpenter
#60. My sole ambition as a composer is to hurl my javelin into the infinite space of the future.
Franz Liszt
#61. A great ancient poet was blind. A great classical composer was deaf. Many of us are dumb. What have we to show for it?
Vera Nazarian
#62. Wherever there's a conductor, you're sure to find a dead composer!
Daniel Handler
#63. Ifukube's music was rarely tampered with or shortened by Honda after it had been recorded and the director gave his composer total freedom in writing whatever music he deemed appropriate.
Peter H. Brothers
#64. Composition is interesting because, in a sense, you always have to let it go. Unless you're a true composer/performer, you're always sending a PDF and then someone else makes it. It's like instructions for a short story, faxed to every English student who's studying it.
Nico Muhly
#65. Trombone virtuoso and innovative composer, Papo combines the best of jazz and Latin music to create a genre that is unique and wild. He's redefined Latin jazz!
Michael Brecker
#66. I happen to love Saint-Saens in general. I think he's a brilliant composer and sometimes underrated in a way because people like to pass him off as fluffy and not being serious.
Joshua Bell
#67. Man has used human rhythmic movement as raw material out of which to create works of art, as the composer of music uses sound, the sculptor uses stone and wood, the painter his pigments, and the writer - words.
Ted Shawn
#68. My dad was a composer and a musician, but he never finished high school. His formal education was rather minimal from the standards of today's college graduates and Ph.D.'s, but he had a deep interest in questions of science and questions of the universe.
Brian Greene
#69. The great opera composers were so good at their job, that the whole genre came to be built around the concept of the composer's vision.
Stewart Copeland
#70. The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working.
Ernest Newman
#71. I just have to take my chances like any other composer.
Gordon Getty
#72. Although in society in general, the idea of an Irish composer of 'classical music', or whatever you want to call it, is still a strange item, generally speaking. Even in the arts, among our fellow creative artists in other disciplines, you still feel slightly out of it.
John Kinsella
#73. The improvisational nature of jazz musicianship is such that a truly competent performer must be prepared to function as an on-the-spot composer who is expected to contribute to the orchestration in progress, not simply to execute the score as it is written and rehearsed.
Albert Murray
#74. I think that being a film composer, someone that gets it and actually applies the music, it allows you to open up a spectrum of feeling. You're now allowed to approach the music from an audio visual perspective.
Adrian Younge
#75. When you think of Mitch Leigh as a businessman, remember he's also a composer. And when you think of Mitch Leigh as a composer, remember he's also a businessman.
Mitch Leigh
#76. Resistance knows that the amateur composer will never write his symphony because he is overly invested in its success and overterrified of its failure.
Steven Pressfield
#77. There is no "End" to be written, neither can you, like an architect, engrave in stone the day the garden was finished. A painter can frame his picture, a composer can notate his coda, but a garden is always on the move.
Mirabel Osler
#78. I think it's really the job of the composer, the artist, the painter, the writer to present people with options. I'm just really reflecting the thoughts and actions around me.
Ian Anderson
#79. The Rhapsody is not a composition at all. It's a string of separate paragraphs stuck together - with a thin paste of flour and water ... I don't think there has been such an inspired melodist on this earth since Tchaikovsky ... but if you want to speak of a composer, that's another matter.
Leonard Bernstein
#80. I had a musician friend once tell me that it's not in the orchestra that you get the true test of the musicians but in the little trios and quintets where you really get to see if they've got the stuff. And the composer.
Wes Craven
#81. A burst of Beethoven that would have made the composer glad he was deaf erupted from her i-Phone.
Ian Simpson
#82. I've been very fortunate as a composer to be involved with projects that have really propelled my scores forward. I'm very proud of it.
Alan Menken
#83. I think actors really like to know what does a casting agent really think or what does a composer really think.
Julie Halston
#84. The main thing the composer needs to do is it needs to remember that the director is there to cheer you on. The director wants you to succeed because if you succeed, you'll be helping the film. And they are truly your conscience. And they're truly your guide.
Hans Zimmer
#85. The ability to understand and deliver comedy and tragedy is extremely rare in one composer.
Signe Baumane
#86. To talk about communication theory without communicating its real mathematical content would be like endlessly telling a man about a wonderful composer, yet never letting him hear an example of the composer's music.
John R. Pierce
#87. I'd love to do a musical actually. My background is in music. I have a bachelors in music. I thought that I was going to be a composer, long ago when I first started. So it was amazingly fun to do those two routines in the film.
Ivan Reitman
#88. I've come up with another formulation about style: that it's essentially a manifestation of a certain habitual set of limitations. It's what a composer does NOT do that defines a style.
James Tenney
#89. I could create music that sounded as strange as any electronic music, because you see, my opinion about electronic music is that the real composer is the guy who invented the instrument. Pressing buttons is not composing. Composing is about creating something.
Glenn Branca
#90. I have a team, the same team of filmmakers I worked with on Pi and Requiem. Which is my cameraman, and my composer, and my producer. We've all worked together for a number of films.
Darren Aronofsky
#91. I have often read critical pieces where the critic said that what the composer was trying to do didn't come off. I have wondered what the critic meant if he didn't know what the composer was trying to do.
Ornette Coleman
#92. You are lyricist, me a composer - you and I make a complete song.
Alexandra Monir
#93. 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.
Charles Hazlewood
#94. Any composer who is gloriously conscious that he is a composer must believe that he receives his inspiration from a source higher than himself.
John Philip Sousa
#95. No composer has yet caught this rhythm of America - it is too mighty for the ears of most.
Isadora Duncan
#96. I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.
Igor Stravinsky
#97. I dare suggest that the composer would do himself and his music an immediate and eventual service by total, resolute and voluntary withdrawal from this public world to one of private performance and electronic media.
Milton Babbitt
#98. For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business. He excites me when I watch him. He moves me. He's the singer who gets across what the composer has in mind, and probably a little more.
Frank Sinatra
#99. Fred Sturm has proven to be a great asset to the musical world as a teacher, composer and author. His gifts have enriched the musical life of all the people who have been fortunate enough to share his wisdom and musicality.
Bob Brookmeyer
#100. I am a composer in search of oblivion; and I'm always slightly ashamed to admit that I compose.
Alexander Borodin
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