Top 100 Quotes About Composers
#1. These composers," Captain Nemo answered me, "are the contemporaries of Orpheus, because in the annals of the dead, all chronological differences fade; and
Jules Verne
#2. I sort of enjoy being able to hear what other composers are doing and how they might score something differently than me. I enjoy that part.
Marco Beltrami
#3. The Western musical canon came about not merely by accumulation, but by opposition and subversion, both to the ruling powers on whom composers depended for their livelihoods and to other musics.
Brian Ferneyhough
#4. Every orchestra I know, every opera house I know, is desperately looking around trying to find new talent, new composing talent, supporting young composers, supporting new ideas, supporting new ways of getting the message across.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
#5. 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.
Sivamani
#6. 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.
Douglas Carter Beane
#7. The fact that the theatregoing public likes my music is no credit to me. There are many other composers who write better music that the public doesn't like.
Jerome Kern
#8. A characteristic of older folksongs, in most cases, is that we don't know their composers or authors. Older folksongs were written often with no commercial purpose in mind. They were passed down by word of mouth, from generation to generation.
Tom Glazer
#9. I don't use composers. I research music the way I research the photographs or the facts in my scripts.
Ken Burns
#10. 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.
Robert Coppola Schwartzman
#11. 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.
Shaan
#12. There are no woman composers, never have been and possibly never will be.
Thomas Beecham
#13. A mission that comes from the heart to promote these things and to encourage composers to write, then of course they should do it. And there are more than a few pianists these days who do this, fortunately.
Marc-Andre Hamelin
#14. You think about, like, [20th-century classical composers] Alban Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern sitting around in some living room in Vienna and being like, "We are the end of music. We are the end of this tradition. Music is done."
David Longstreth
#15. When I began, the guitar was en-closed in a vicious circle. There were no composers writing for the guitar, be-cause there were no virtuoso guitarists.
Andres Segovia
#16. Good writers are monotonous, like good composers. They keep trying to perfect the one problem they were born to understand.
Alberto Moravia
#17. My mother took me to Venice one time and showed me all the houses where famous composers used to live. It gave me a fascination for music and the city, but also for architecture. It was a valuable lesson.
Ben Van Berkel
#18. I'm interested in what happens to music when other people use it. Whereas there are composers who don't like anyone to touch their music, I think people should because they do things I can't think of.
Philip Glass
#19. Well, the very best operas are the ones written by the very best composers.
John Eaton
#20. 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.
Sarah Brightman
#21. Compared with other Indian film composers, I only write about six movies a year. Others write up to 60.
A.R. Rahman
#22. My tastes went all over the place, from Strauss to Mahler. I was never a big Wagner or Tchaikovsky fan. Benjamin Britten, Tallis, all the early English Medieval music, Prokofiev, some Russian composers, mostly the people that were the colorists, the French.
James Horner
#23. The musical equivalent of St Pancras Station.
(on Elgar)
Thomas Beecham
#24. There are only
two types of composers:
composing composers
and decomposing composers.
Lera Auerbach
#25. A lot of composers I know hate temp scores because people get attached to them.
Steven Price
#26. 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
#27. And this totally normal conversation unspools from there, covering the basics: family, siblings, school, favorite composers, favorite movies, favorite wood (for carving puppets), the prehistory of the sandwich, and whether the ancient Romans got their togas caught in the spokes of their unicycles
Laini Taylor
#28. How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards would be at one's throat all the sooner.
David Mitchell
#29. Statistically in the UK, there are so many fewer female composers than male songwriters and they're marketed in a way that - females are marketed in a way that they're these independent unique artists writing their own stuff, and they're not, because fourteen percent of PRS goes to women.
Kate Nash
#30. The three greatest composers are Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. All the others are cretins.
Hans Von Bulow
#31. 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
#33. Not many composers have ideas. Far more of them know how to use strange instruments which do not require ideas.
George Gershwin
#34. For a short while she considered the idea of orchestral courtesy. Certainly one should avoid giving political offence: German orchestras, of course, used to be careful about playing Wagner abroad, at least in some countries, choosing instead German composers who were somewhat more ... apologetic.
Alexander McCall Smith
#35. Composers and musicians have always starved and, as this is a sentimental country, we think the tradition should be continued.
Thomas Beecham
#36. Too many composers become involved in intellectual speculation which seems to matter more to them than the sound that comes out of all this speculation.
Louise Talma
#37. Reading great works of literature, discovering poetry, and listening to the best composers are all ways that we learn to love the Creator more.
Jennifer A. Marshall
#38. 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.
Wallace Shawn
#39. I would like to see more new productions of new material by new composers/lyricists/book writers. I would like to see people take more chances. I think because everything costs so much they're not taking the chances they used to.
Harold Prince
#40. I think a lot of composers get into trouble just making up a plot and expecting an audience to follow that.
John Eaton
#41. In simple hearts the feeling for the beauty and grandeur of nature is a hundred-fold stronger and more vivid than in us, ecstatic composers of narratives in words and on paper.
Mikhail Lermontov
#42. There's always been good and bad music. Many composers hide behind modern music in order to not make music.
Pepe Romero
#43. I was very drawn to music of all types, from Beethoven to Jimi Hendrix. There were musicians and composers who obviously were expressing a vision that was beyond the mundane.
Frederick Lenz
#44. Themes so vast that only composers could even approach them. If at all. All other artists must practice humility before them.
Jan-Philipp Sendker
#45. The composers hated me. The singers detested me. The guitarists were terrified by me.
Bulat Okudzhava
#46. I'm blessed to be working with wizards like Vishal Bhardwaj as well as many young composers.
Sukhwinder Singh
#47. All Bach's last movements are like the running of a sewing machine.
(on Bach)
Arnold Bax
#48. There are a lot of composers who were fantastic, but I challenge them to write a record that you could play five times a day for two months on the radio, songs that people will want to dance to on a Saturday night.
Robert Wyatt
#49. 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
#50. Many, many composers have only found their way to a certain form, through familiarizing themselves with texts.
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau
#51. Those who were still able to write beautiful melodies were kitsch composers like Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky approaches true art not in his numerous beautiful melodies, but when a melodic line is thwarted.
Slavoj Zizek
#52. I've got a collection of songs that I've had, I keep adding to and they're all great American composers. I wanted to showcase American composers and I've done that on a lot of my records and played things by American composers that I really respect.
Charlie Haden
#53. 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.
Mark Morris
#54. There are wonderful composers and librettists out there. It's the lack of creative producers that is troubling.
Harold Prince
#55. We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.
Brian Eno
#56. Playwrights have texts, composers have scores, painters and sculptors have the residue of those activities, and dance is traditionally an ephemeral, effervescent, here-today-gone-tomorrow kind of thing.
Twyla Tharp
#57. Composers in the old days used to keep strictly to the base of the theme, as their real subject. Beethoven varies the melody, harmony and rhythms so beautifully.
Johannes Brahms
#58. My favorite composers are the ones that tell the story. I love Wagner. I love Mahler. Prokofiev. The programmatic music. I listen more to classic rock because I don't like the contemporary music very much.
Patti LuPone
#59. What inspires me is not so much the music as the opportunity to interact with composers. I think that has driven everything I've done.
Robert Moog
#60. Although technical discussions are interesting to composers, I suspect that the truly magical and spiritual powers of music arise from deeper levels of our psyche.
George Crumb
#61. By the cigars they smoke, and the composers they love, ye shall know the texture of men's souls.
John Galsworthy
#62. Why does the world need a Piano Day? For many reasons. But mostly, because it doesn't hurt to celebrate the piano and everything around it: performers, composers, piano builders, tuners, movers and most important, the listener.
Nils Frahm
#63. A hundred years ago, of course, the question that the German Composers' Co-operative asked itself sounded a lot more fundamental: How do you create a fair share for those who ensure that works can actually be performed at all?
Johannes Rau
#64. The first year I started in San Francisco, there was an American work on every program and there's been a lot of music by living composers and gradually that was part of the process of getting the audience really to trust me.
Michael Tilson Thomas
#65. All of these people kept on being professional musicians and composers in the strictest sense.
James Tenney
#66. Like many composers, most of my compositions are influenced by the music I've listened to throughout my life.
Nobuo Uematsu
#67. New Amsterdam Records, a new label run by composers, has begun documenting this hybrid music, with invigorating discs by the band itsnotyouitsme and the composers Corey Dargel and William Brittelle.
Allan Kozinn
#68. 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
#69. I was starting a group of musicians and we had a group of young composers in Finland back in the '70s, and the real conductors, the professional conductors at the time were not interested in our stuff.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
#70. Most composers and arrangers these days use computer programs and keyboards, but I'm one of those dinosaurs that still writes it down on score paper and still dreams it up in his ear first.
Phil Coulter
#71. Paul McCartney is a genius ... Paul married Rock & Roll
to beauty, and forever raised the bar for composers,
musicians, and fans ... an incredible solo performer ...
the creator of our favorite songs ...
Alec Baldwin
#72. 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.
Stephen Sondheim
#73. Composers often think in terms of music and not of an instrument itself.
Michala Petri
#74. The new kind of music seems to create not from the heart but from the head. Its composers think rather than feel. They have not the capacity to make their works exalt - they meditate, protest, analyze, reason, calculate and brood, but they do not exalt.
Sergei Rachmaninoff
#75. The fact that certain composers have been able to create first-class music within the medium of film proves that film music can be as good as the composer is gifted.
Jerry Goldsmith
#76. I am not one of the great composers. All the great have produced enormously. There is everything in their work - the best and the worst, but there is always quantity. But I have written relatively little.
Maurice Ravel
#77. [Composers] Mark [Shaiman] and Scott [Wittman] are unreal
Megan Hilty
#78. 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.
Rudy Vallee
#79. Well, American composers are the best composers. At this time in the world, we are where the energy is. We are the most diverse, the most iconoclastic, the most maverick, and the most skillful.
David Del Tredici
#80. So many important New York musicians were gay, one wit dubbed the American Composers League the Homintern.
Charles Kaiser
#81. You do not play a sonata in order to reach the final chord, and if the meanings of things were simply in ends, composers would write nothing but finales.
Alan W. Watts
#82. 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.
Terry Teachout
#83. I was always drawn to Broadway musicals, and obviously composers like Gershwin, Rodgers, Berlin and Porter were writing music that I found wildly impressive.
Marvin Hamlisch
#84. I don't meet stockbrokers or carpenters or coal miners; I spend all day with actors, composers and photographers.
Michael Caine
#85. It's so interesting, you know, whenever you read the accounts of composers playing their own music, that they had very different priorities than performers. None of them seemed too concerned about the plastic realization of their music.
Helene Grimaud
#86. Even experimental composers, revolutionary composers, self-styled radicals are, in writing revolutionary music, recognizing the music that preceded them precisely by trying to avoid it.
Leonard Bernstein
#87. Few of us boggle - though we should - at the fact that Louis Armstrong sang and played trumpet with similar panache, or that Leonard Bernstein and Benjamin Britten were equally adept as composers, conductors and pianists.
Terry Teachout
#88. The best results come when people believe in and feel strongly about the music they are playing. Just as composers write for certain types of performers, performers are also looking for certain things.
Michael Hersch
#89. 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.
Robert Morris
#90. Composers don't just sit in a room and write things that are in their heads, they actually listen to a lot of music, pop music, jazz, rock and roll, any combination of music that catches their ear.
Hilary Hahn
#91. Music is at once the product of feeling and knowledge, for it requires from its disciples, composers and performers alike, not only talent and enthusiasm, but also that knowledge and perception which are the result of protracted study and reflection.
Alban Berg
#92. 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.
Steven Price
#93. When I was a kid, I looked at art as a way of blending everything. One of my favorite composers is Wagner - who coined the term "gesamtkunstwerk," or "total art work." That's what was going on in the 19th century, and the 20th century just kept it going.
DJ Spooky
#94. A large part of my work has been collaborating with composers; I think we've commissioned about 140 pieces now, a lot of them percussion concertos.
Evelyn Glennie
#95. It's amazing how fast generations lose sight of other generations. One of the first things the young composers who come to work with me say is that they want to write music people will like, instead of gaining their credentials by being rejected by the audience.
Carlisle Floyd
#96. Since Mozart's day composers have learned the art of making music throatily and palpitatingly sexual.
Aldous Huxley
#97. Composers shouldn't think too much - it interferes with their plagiarism.
Howard Dietz
#98. I was not influenced by composers as much as by natural objects and physical phenomena.
Edgard Varese
#99. The Russian composers, especially, tricked the symphony orchestra into the kind of dynamic, rhythmic thing.
Gerry Mulligan
#100. When the Domaine Musical started up, I wasn't part of it. They were the major players in contemporary music at that time, braodcasting old and new composers' work. And I wasn't one of them.
Luc Ferrari
