Top 100 Composer S Quotes
#1. If my serenade of song and story should serve as a pillow for some composer's head, as yet perhaps unborn, to dream and build on our fond melodies in his tomorrow, I have not labored in vain.
William Christopher Handy
#2. It is always interesting and sometimes even important to have intimate knowledge of a composer's life, but it is not essential in order to understand the composer's works.
Daniel Barenboim
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. She seemed to have apprehended all of the composer's coldness and none of his poetry.
Kate Chopin
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. Wagner exploited all forms of expression at a composer's disposal - harmony, dynamics, orchestration - to the extreme. His music is highly emotional, and at the same time Wagner has extraordinary control over the effect he achieves.
Daniel Barenboim
#9. To judge a composer's work, one must consider it as a whole.
Gustav Mahler
#10. I believe that interpretation should be like a transparent glass, a window for the composer's music.
Vladimir Ashkenazy
#11. The negative is the equivalent of the composer's score, and the print the performance.
Ansel Adams
#12. Every composer's music reflects in its subject-matter and in its style the source of the money the composer is living on while writing the music.
Virgil Thomson
#13. A composer's job involves the decoration of fragments of time.
Frank Zappa
#14. How strange and god-like was a composer's power, who from the grave could lead through sequences of emotion, which he alone had felt at first, a girl like her who had never heard of his name, and never would have a clue to his personality.
Thomas Hardy
#15. The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.
Ansel Adams
#16. Remember always that the composer's pen is still mightier than the bow of the violinist; in you lie all the possibilities of the creation of beauty.
John Philip Sousa
#17. I think of all music as existing in the substance of the air itself. It is the composer's task to order and make sense of sound, in time and space, to communicate something about being alive through music.
Libby Larsen
#18. Intelligent analysis of the composer's intention and strict adherence to it automatically ensures sincerity.
Kate Smith
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. Bach's music is really some of the greatest. I think, in some ways, Bach is the most profound composer of all.
Joshua Bell
#33. He's not a performer, he's not a composer, he's not even a musician, but Norman Granz is Mr. Jazz.
Oscar Peterson
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. It's understanding the intention of a composer that allows a producer and an arranger to make those moments speak.
Michael Bolton
#38. Around eighth grade I decided I wanted to be a composer and that's what I went to college for. Just a few years back, I switched out of composition and into creative writing so I could work with words.
Joanna Newsom
#39. It's really strange, but they speak to me - the notes and the chords. So when I hear other people's music, I can feel the composer. Whoever created that, I can see in their soul.
Yanni
#40. 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.
Evelyn Glennie
#41. Matisse was my God. I'm a French artist, that's for sure. I am color-oriented and what you might call a composer. I am not pouring my guts out; I keep them inside.
Francoise Gilot
#42. Today each composer is not only involved in aesthetics, but he's actually trying to create his own language.
Leo Ornstein
#43. It's not a special taste. An American composer should have something to say to a cab driver.
Morton Gould
#44. If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.
Simon Rattle
#45. I grew up mostly in Champaign, Illinois. My dad was at the University of East Illinois, so I was always around the music. One of my dad's buddies was the avant-garde composer John Cage, so I picked up on that weird classical and eclectic music.
Stuart Hamm
#47. Sammy Davis, Andy Williams, Tony Bennett ... their records sell in the millions; when I do it, it just trickles. But for the composer and lyricist, there's a tidy bit to be made that way, too, so I don't really mind.
Anthony Newley
#48. Every composer understands and uses the system of notation differently, and that's what makes you appreciate the trouble they go through in doing so.
Marc-Andre Hamelin
#49. Since Mozart's day composers have learned the art of making music throatily and palpitatingly sexual.
Aldous Huxley
#50. It's a myth that you need to understand all the ins and outs of music. The ideal scenario is you have a conceptual, directorial conversation about what you're trying to achieve in a theme and then trust your composer to go ahead and do that.
Henry Jackman
#51. I always go back to the original material. I want a good connection as the composer and writer of the score to the director and to the source material. It's really important.
Howard Shore
#52. When I was 20, Shostakovich was my favorite composer. I still find his Fifth Symphony wonderful, with its outstanding themes and rhythms. That's the piece that made me want to be a classical composer.
Dave Brubeck
#53. Jerry Goldsmith is the #1 composer working now. He's open to new ideas and always inventing.
Elmer Bernstein
#54. What's great about [Guettel] is his very distinct voice as a composer. And that distinct voice is something worth cherishing and expressing so we just didn't want to screw that up.
Bartlett Sher
#55. The real architecture happens within the works themselves, and that was done by the composer. That's where the real skill is. In putting together a program, you're more a curator, but that's important as well. And then the interpreting of it is where our big job is.
Joshua Bell
#56. The 'cleverness' syndrome has taken the place of melody. It's like everyone has come down with this terrible disease in jazz ... you are always expected to do your own material, which is a strange thing to do if you're a poor composer but a great player.
Keith Jarrett
#57. I think Bach is equally a romantic composer because he laid the seeds harmonically for people like Chopin and the great Romantics, Brahms, so it's difficult to you know all this like labelling and putting - I think Bach is attractive to musicians because he supersedes the labels.
Nigel Kennedy
#58. If we compel the composer to write in terms of what the listener is able to hear, we flirt with the danger of freezing the evolution of musical language, whose progressive development comes about through transgressions of a given era's perceptual habits.
Jean-Jacques Nattiez
#59. The art of making films is a collaborative art. As a composer, you're always working with the cinematographer because he's so much the heart of the world they've created on film.
Howard Shore
#60. I think there's a time as a writer when you want to see the best things in life, and you go out wherever you go with your dreams as a writer or a composer.
Tori Amos
#61. It's a cute little studio apartment that has just what I need: a bed, a couch, a table, a chair, and a coffee-maker.
Shawn Lukas
#62. There's no card, business card, better than a compact disc for a composer. It doesn't half impress people and they get a long way on it ... these composers they will get more performances, more commissions, more recognition just by having that disc
Peter Maxwell Davies
#63. There's more musical freedom on Madison Avenue than anywhere else. It's an Eden for a composer.
Mitch Leigh
#64. Yes, Carl Vine stuck around. He's now number one composer for choreography.
Graeme Murphy
#65. Sometimes, a remix is good because it reaches a whole new generation. But when it gets too much, it's irritating. Also, the original composer needs to be credited properly.
A.R. Rahman
#66. Wherever there's a conductor, you're sure to find a dead composer!
Daniel Handler
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. This music, transmitted by loud-speakers, made a masterpiece appear like an amateurish attempt at composition by nimcompoop
Paul Hindemith
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. It's nice to have a great female composer in the program and add her color.
Cecilia Bartoli
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. Elizabeth Lutyens was the first professional composer that I ever knew. I sent someextremely infantile pieces that I I'd written and got marvellous encouragement andinterest from her ... she's certainly the English composer who's influenced me themost.
Richard Rodney Bennett
#88. I don't like to do things the same way every time. You always want to be evolving as a composer, and if your creative process is exactly the same each time, then how do you expect today's work to be any different from yesterday's?
Christopher Tin
#89. As a composer, Dylan now fits comfortably alongside George Gershwin or Irving Berlin, though he grumpily refuses to wear any man's collar.
Douglas Brinkley
#90. So, it becomes an exercise in futility if you write something that does not express the film as the director wishes. It's still their ball game. It's their show. I think any successful composer learns how to dance around the director's impulses.
Danny Elfman
#91. 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.
Matt Schulze
#92. The discrepancy between the vacationists' good times and Isolde's unfortunate experience is more than disgusting
Paul Hindemith
#93. We are God's gift to each other. Like a master composer, He brings all the instruments together, each with a different tone, each playing a different part, and He makes it turn out so beautifully.
Jack Canfield
#94. You become a great composer when you win a Pulitzer. But I think that now it's a completely meaningless award.
John Corigliano
#95. It's hard to decide how to match words to music. It's not like it's twice the work. It's always difficult for me to explain to the composer what I'm looking for. I'm not a professional; I lack even basic knowledge about writing music.
Ayumi Hamasaki
#96. When we walked down the aisle, they played Taco Bell's Canyon, Quinn says knowingly. (Named for its German composer, Johann TacoBell.)
Michael Lewis
#97. Since the composer has said everything, if you discover everything, it will be enough and you will be a happy man. Don't try to say it's your taste, and because of that you are changing this or that. And I must say this respect is still there.
Kurt Masur
#98. Music is not written in red, white and blue. It is written in the heart's blood of the composer.
Nellie Melba
#99. In a timepiece, a sweep of a second hand is so slim in a way that it doesn't wait for no man, and that's why we choose to conceive things from the heart.
Shawn Lukas
#100. Genetically, I have tons of musical background in my life. My mother's father was a famous Weimar-era composer, Ernst Toch. My father's mother was the head of the Vienna Conservatory's piano department. It all canceled out in my case. I'm completely hopeless in music.
Lawrence Weschler
