Top 100 Quotes About Composers
#1. DEAFNESS DOESN'T PREVENT COMPOSERS HEARING THE MUSIC. IT PREVENTS THEM HEARING THE DISTRACTIONS.
Terry Pratchett
#2. I have declared that I will work free of cost with those composers who are passionate about their work. Sohail Sen is one such lad, whose music in Banjaara has been liked a lot.
Sukhwinder Singh
#3. Nobody can give a good performance unless the authors and composers have written a good part, a fact which is often overlooked.
Judy Holliday
#4. It may well be that some composers do not believe in God. All of them, however, believe in Bach.
Bela Bartok
#5. History's greatest composers would be appalled to hear their greatest works reduced to distorted hold music for businesses.
Michael P. Naughton
#6. Composers need words, but they do not necessarily need poetry. The Russian composer, Aleksandr Mossolov, who chose texts from newspaper small ads, had a good point to make. With revolutionary music, any text can be set to work.
James Fenton
#7. Composers tend to assume that everyone loves music. Surprisingly enough, everyone doesn't.
Aaron Copland
#8. 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.
Jonny Greenwood
#9. In the scientific community you find competent teachers and original researchers, just as in the musical community you find many good performers but very few good composers.
Mario Bunge
#10. 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.
Michael Tilson Thomas
#11. The (photographic) negative is the equivalent of the composers score and the print is the equivalent of the conductors performance.
Ansel Adams
#12. Music is of two kinds: one petty, poor, second-rate, never varying, its base the hundred or so phrasings which all musicians understand, a babbling which is more or less pleasant, the life that most composers live.
Honore De Balzac
#13. Composers are influenced by all the important music in their lives - and I suppose that since radio started playing popular music, that's as likely to be The Beatles or Aphex Twin as it is to be Verdi or Ravel.
Jonny Greenwood
#14. Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries.
Brian Ferneyhough
#15. Music is much like fucking, but some composers can't climax and others climax too often, leaving themselves and the listener jaded and spent.
Charles Bukowski
#16. Just as composers go to concerts and artists visit galleries, writers read. You will learn, in the most enjoyable way, more about style and language from reading good literature than you will ever acquire from workshops and how-to books.
Judith Barrington
#18. 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
#19. The public want actresses, because they think all actresses bad. They don't want music or poetry because they know that both are good. So actors and actresses thrive and poets and composers starve.
George Bernard Shaw
#20. I am certain that most composers today would consider today's music to be rich, not to say confusing, in its enormous diversity of styles, technical procedures, and systems of esthetics.
George Crumb
#21. 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.
Tyler Cowen
#22. I regrettably wasted time at university by being overwhelmed and intimidated by the talent of other composers. I felt stuck and didn't know what I was doing there. I enjoyed my experience, but I didn't grab it in the way I would now.
Laura Mvula
#23. Outlaws, like lovers, poets, and tubercular composers who cough blood onto piano keys, do their finest work in the slippery rays of the moon.
Tom Robbins
#24. I cannot listen to Beethoven or Mahler or Chopin or Bach when I write because those composers require you stop what you are doing and listen.
Antonio Damasio
#25. I've heard though that there is a younger generation of tonal French composers who are reacting with vigour.
Gavin Bryars
#27. I began like all composers, writing for small groups. Chamber groups.
David Del Tredici
#28. There are some composers - at the head of whom stands Beethoven - who not only do not know when to stop but appear to stop many times before they actually do.
Virginia Graham
#29. Let us not forget that the greatest composers were also the greatest thieves. They stole from everyone and everywhere.
Pablo Casals
#30. Fortunately, I started very young, so I read music very well. And my favorite composers to play are Brahms and Mozart.
Condoleezza Rice
#32. I've always had my ear peeled for interesting music. As a student, I regularly spent time hunting for interesting repertoire, looking through music bins, buying stacks and stacks of CDs, and discovering rarely played pieces by composers.
Anne Akiko Meyers
#33. I'm a fanatic about Irish music. I love its moody, modal and timeless quality. I'm different from some other composers, because I don't look at this as just a job. I think of music as art.
James Horner
#34. Most artists, most painters, even composers would want to come back and redo their work. They've got a new perspective on it, they've got more resources, they have better technology, and they can fix or finish the things that were never done.
George Lucas
#35. I can't imagine myself falling for a man who can't cite ten proverbs, five philosophical allusions, and the names of three composers).
Anonymous
#36. Most of the important composers in our country are clustered in the Northeast.
Carlisle Floyd
#37. I listen only to Bach, Beethoven or Mozart. Life is too short to waste on other composers.
John Edensor Littlewood
#38. 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!
Gunther Schuller
#39. Artists, composers and writers...are bent upon capturing and reining in the insights of a fugitive imagination, always inclined to shoot off into the distance, before they can get away, and on bringing them back into the immediacy of material engagement. Like hunters, they too are dream-catchers.
Tim Ingold
#40. A dean is the conductor of an orchestra made up entirely of composers.
Mark William Roche
#41. Still, American composers working in France have had a pretty hard time.
Gavin Bryars
#42. History's greatest composers world be rolling in their graves if they knew that their beautiful compositions were reduced to distorted hold music.
Michael P. Naughton
#43. Every piece of music is a form of personal expression for its creator ... If a work doesnt express the composers own personal point of view, his own ideas, then it doesnt, in my opinion, even deserve to be born.
Dmitri Shostakovich
#44. 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.
Bill Conti
#45. It was about finding creative, original musicians. Musicians who are strong composers. Flexible, empathetic musicians, who are great individually but who also have a great sense for cooperation and collaboration, great listeners as well as great players.
Joshua Redman
#46. A lot of composers before me have been on this mission to change the world by getting off equal temperament, and I'm definitely one of those.
Aphex Twin
#47. Composers love to write for symphony orchestras because the symphony is the Rolls Royce of musical instruments.
David Del Tredici
#48. Composers are the only people who can hear good music above bad sounds.
John Philip Sousa
#49. Gifted women musicians and composers rarely received their due.
James Cook
#50. Not all, but too many of the best writers, composers, and artists of our time begin to be acclaimed only when they no longer have anything to say and take to performing instead of stating.
Clement Greenberg
#51. I have to say I owe my career to the master composers of the Great American Songbook who have written such high-quality songs - the best popular music ever composed.
Tony Bennett
#53. I think the thing's that perhaps sad really is that younger people haven't come in and I think it must have been absolutely fantastic to have worked in the 50's when you had all of the great Broadway composers and when West Side Story didn't win the Tony Award.
Andrew Lloyd Webber
#54. We teach young kids from 8 to 14 or 15 about their musical heritage through great songs written by American songwriters. We don't do too many modern composers, although we include songs from Billy Joel and other writers like him.
Margaret Whiting
#55. I listen to new music by composers who are interesting to me. I listen to some; I don't know if I want to call it pop, but it's some interesting artist that gets my attention, I listen to in the mornings.
Tod Machover
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. It's nice that all the composers have said that nobody interprets a lyric like Fred Astaire. But when it comes to selling records I was never worth anything particularly except as a collector's item.
Fred Astaire
#60. 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.'
Eric Whitacre
#61. Composers are in some ways the last frontier of musician that gets a paycheck for their musical services.
Cliff Martinez
#62. Composers should write tunes that chauffeurs and errand boys can whistle.
Thomas Beecham
#63. My musical knowledge is so bad it's embarrassing. When composers discuss music with someone as primitive as myself, they have to talk about it in terms of senses and emotion, rather than keys and tempo.
Jane Campion
#64. I tend to listen to the classical composers: Rachmaninov, Satie.
Enya
#65. 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.
Enya
#66. All great composers of the past spent most of their time studying. Feeling alone won't do the job. A man also needs technique.
George Gershwin
#67. Composition is notation of distortion of what composers think they've heard before. Masterpieces are marvelous misquotations.
Ned Rorem
#68. The September 11 attacks were the greatest work of art in the cosmos ... compared to that, we composers are nothing
Karlheinz Stockhausen
#69. My greatest experiences in the theatre and the most religious experiences in my life - of which going to the opera is one for me - have been with the Romantic composers' repertoire: it's Wagner, it's Strauss, Verdi, Puccini. That era gets me every time.
Rufus Wainwright
#70. My advice to composers is, 'Try to reach 90, and everyone will love you.'
Gian Carlo Menotti
#71. Music is a continuum and the modern and avant-garde composers of today will be part of the standard repertoire 30 years from now.
Neville Marriner
#72. The artists are the most powerful ones, the creators, first are the painters, working without words, second are the music composers, and third are the writers.
Robert Black
#73. There is competition. It's almost like I'm back in tennis competing in a way. There are usually about twenty composers vying for the number one spot for a big or medium film.
Aaron Zigman
#74. I would still love to do more Handel. I think Handel was a fantastic composer. I did lots of Vivaldi, but it's also important to do the music of Handel, one of the greatest composers of the 18th century.
Cecilia Bartoli
#75. Many of the greatest composers and musicians do their best work in extreme confinement but we are seeing it in other fields - uses of technology to link people together in networks to solve problems and almost certainly we'll get better ideas than we would from them just doing it on their own.
Geoff Mulgan
#76. Worse than the composers' suffering, though, was the fact that the girl was playing the music with such soul because she knew she was going to die. And am not going to die? Where is my soul that I might play the music of my own life with such enthusiasm?
Paulo Coelho
#77. What gives Bach and Mozart a place apart is that these two great expressive composers never sacrificed form to expression.
Camille Saint-Saens
#78. If you look at the history of music, you have classical composers, church music, pop music, etc. Music that's existed for centuries. I think there are some songs that are close to immortal. They will last longer than we will in this lifetime.
Mike Love
#79. Composers, like authors, have a lot in common. Our main goal is to connect with the listener emotionally.
Ken Hill
#80. One day the 'Maple Leaf' will make me King of Ragtime Composers.
Scott Joplin
#81. Of all composers, past and present, I am the least learned. I mean that in all seriousness, and by learning I do not mean knowledge of music.
Giuseppe Verdi
#82. I would advise my young colleagues, the composers of symphonies, to drop in sometimes at the kindergarten, too. It is there that it is decided whether there will be anybody to understand their works in twenty years' time.
Zoltan Kodaly
#84. I have always personally preferred to think of what is more difficult for my instrument, and not what is the most natural or the easiest. I enjoy the challenges - especially those that come with composers who have written contemporary music for the recorder.
Michala Petri
#85. I suppose I was affected by raw sounds and timbres more than a lot of other composers. Had I been involved with orchestral composing, I think the aspect that would have most endeared me to that field would have been the orchestration.
Wendy Carlos
#86. You can't have Bach, Mozart and Beethoven as your favorite composers. They simply define what music is!
Michael Tilson Thomas
#87. The structural thinking I use in the concert hall is unnecessary to most film projects, and most film composers make better use of the enormous range of pop and other materials and techniques required of them than I probably would, faced with the same challenge.
John Corigliano
#88. 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.
Brian Ferneyhough
#89. I am an arrogant and impatient listener, but in the case of a few composers, a very few, when I hear a work I do not like, I am convinced that it is my own fault. Verdi is one of those composers.
Benjamin Britten
#90. In America, at the beginning of talkies, they pulled Fred Astaire from the theaters and put him on the screen and had all of these great composers write songs for him. They call it the Great American Songbook; I call it the Fred Astaire Songbook because they were written for him.
Tony Bennett
#91. I still the love classic period, but also the baroque period, and even 17th-Century music such as the music of Monteverdi. He's one of the greatest opera composers. He was the one who really started the opera.
Cecilia Bartoli
#92. In a fit at the bookstore one day, I bought all my favourite composers' biographies: Schubert, Massenet, Wolf. I've still not had a chance to read them; it breaks my heart. But when you travel so much, you just can't take that many books with you.
Danielle De Niese
#93. Writers, Composers, Painters, - also artists like directors and actors fall into the same category. They have to be handled with kid gloves, mentally and physically
Marlene Dietrich
#94. Composers and lyricists are making songs that are approved by the producers and directors.
Shaan
#96. Composers can do things that weren't allowed in the 17th century. Until we had composers like Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Rachmaninoff to break the rules.
Aaron Zigman
#97. When you have great songs that are going to live longer than the composers, everything you can do to bring those different elements and nuances out, serve the song.
Michael Bolton
#98. God created music as a common language for all men. It inspires the poets, the composers and the architects. It lures us to search our souls for the meaning of the mysteries described in ancient books.
Khalil Gibran
#99. Magicians are typically introverted; they don't tend to work with others, but I work with software programmers, composers, designers, so it's a very diverse group and the result is always more interesting than something I could have done by myself.
Marco Tempest
#100. 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
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