Quotes About Composition Music

#1. It is a mistake to think that the practice of my art has become easy to me. I assure you, dear friend, no one has given so much care to the study of composition as I. There is scarcely a famous master in music whose works I have not frequently and diligently studied.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

#2. When I was four years old, my mother put me into a school for early music education where you get perfect pitch and harmony and composition.

Yoko Ono

#3. In composition you have all the time you want to decide what to say in 15 seconds, in improvisation you have 15 seconds.

Steve Lacy

#4. This music, transmitted by loud-speakers, made a masterpiece appear like an amateurish attempt at composition by nimcompoop

Paul Hindemith

#5. I want less and less control with music. Just playing music without any idea of composition or writing.

Yann Tiersen

#6. I have to say in premise 'Winter Journal' is really not a memoir. And I don't even think of it as an autobiography. I think of it as a literary composition - similar to music - composed of autobiographical fragments. I'm really not telling the story of my life in a coherent narrative form.

Paul Auster

#7. I started playing the piano, pretty much on my own, when I was 5, and I started writing music when I was 7. In fact, I won a composition award. It was a crummy little piece, but I won with it.

Maury Yeston

#8. Human lives are conmposed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of an individual's life.

Milan Kundera

#9. Music, art, and literature are inseparable for me. How does "composition" evolve in a music and art context? It's a question we can never answer: it only asks for more information and generates more questions.

DJ Spooky

#10. What I try to impart to a musician is to really try to practice the instrument in a really sincere way. Learn as much about music as you possibly can. Learn composition. Study to try to create compositions of your own and put your own personal touch on your music.

Roscoe Mitchell

#11. A song is a short composition for voice and instruments. It is a piece of sung poetry set to music. It is usually only a few minutes long.

Russell Smith

#12. Going back and forth between Western Arabic and African countries clearly created the various musical backgrounds I could have and obviously influenced my professional attitude, my way of approaching both music composition and singing, particularly phrasing.

Rokia Traore

#13. I tell you before God, and as an honest man, your son is the greatest composer known to me by person and repute, he has taste and what is more the greatest skill in composition. (Said to Leopold Mozart)

Joseph Haydn

#14. Grace was pouring out everywhere, from hidden sounds, into Els's damaged auditory cortex. And all that secret, worldwide composition said the same thing: listen closer, listen smaller, listen lighter, to any noise at all, and hear what the world will still sound like, long after your concert ends.

Richard Powers

#15. I never presumed that a technique of composition or an idea was so special that just using it would guarantee the quality of the music.

Robert Morris

#16. A composition is always more than the sum of its parts. In other words, a really good piece of music is more than itself. It's sort of like a prism, which you can see from each facet a single totality.

Yo-Yo Ma

#17. Music is, for me, like a beautiful mosaic which God has put together. He takes all the pieces in his hand, throws them into the world, and we have to recreate the picture from the pieces.

Jean Sibelius

#18. Music would lose its charm were not dissonance interspersed at frequent intervals. The closer a composer can come to discord without actually entering it in the score, the more pleasing will be his composition when given life through musical instruments.

Max Heindel

#19. I am now satisfied that the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called negro melodies. This must be the real foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States.

Antonin Dvorak

#20. It's [music composition] the most effortless thing in the world because you don't do anything. I hate to say it like that, but it's the truth.

Michael Jackson

#21. Within the context of Western music, jazz has always contained certain radical or revolutionary aspects. These are: improvisation, collective composition and individuality or the personal sound (based on amazing variations in sonority, timbre and pitch).

Michael Snow

#22. Whether you love Bach or would rather listen to a composition produced by Kulitta Software, Bach has and will continue to demand the we approach and answer the question, 'what is the art, science and language of music?

Anastasia Lily

#23. With respect to excellence of style and composition, it may perhaps be said that to practised ears the most pleasing music is such as has the merit of novelty, added to refinement, and ingenious contrivance; and to the ignorant, such as is most familiar and common.

Charles Burney

#24. Is it not the business of the conductor to convey to the public in its dramatic form the central idea of a composition; and how can he convey that idea successfully if he does not enter heart and soul into the life of the music and the tale it unfolds?

John Philip Sousa

#25. There is much modern music that is better adapted to a wind combination than to a string, although for obvious reasons originally scored for an orchestra. If in such cases the interpretation is equal to the composition the balance of a wind combination is more satisfying.

John Philip Sousa

#26. I allow my creativity to push me in directions that are simply interesting to me and I don't worry about the likeness of the result to some notion - some paradigm - of what music composition is supposed to be.

Mark Applebaum

#27. The sound of the rain needs no translation. In music one doesn't make the end of the composition the point of the composition ... Same way in dancing, you don't aim at one particular spot in the room ... The whole point of dancing is the dance.

Alan Watts

#28. I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find drama. Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style.

Ken Burns

#29. My training in music and composition then led me to a kind of musical language process in which, for example, the sound of the words I play with has to expose their true meaning against their will so to speak.

Elfriede Jelinek

#30. The way I listen to music goes in waves depending on a lot of things. How busy I am, if I'm in between composition projects, if I'm starting a new project. So, the only time I listen to the radio for music is with my daughter's when I'm driving them to school, or driving them somewhere.

Tod Machover

#31. I began seriously concentrating on music study after I entered senior high school. I went to a class in the arts section at the YMCA and learned music theory and composition. Today, there are many classes like this available, but this was not so much the case in those days.

Isao Tomita

#32. From a very early period of my life I have derived the highest enjoyment from listening to music, especially to melody, which is to me the most pleasing form of composition.

James Nasmyth

#33. As a director, the biggest job is to discern the imperfections in emotional tone and then view it in the global picture of what you're trying to do, if that makes sense. It's a rhythm, like music is a rhythm or composition and art is a rhythm. Dialogue is a rhythm as well.

Robert Stromberg

#34. Usually, when Nirvana made music, there wasn't a lot of conversation. We wanted everything to be surreal. We didn't want to have some contrived composition.

Dave Grohl

#35. The conception, composition, practice, and performance of a piece of music can blossom in a single moment.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

#36. If it hadn't worked out professionally, I would be teaching music theory and composition in a small college somewhere and playing drums in a jazz trio at the Holiday Inn on weekends, and I'd be happy there, too.

J. D. Souther

#37. There is a kinship between music and painting - with the same words used to describe both, as when a musical composition is said to have color and a painting to have rhythm.

Alton Tobey

#38. I did take composition lessons when I was in high school, so I wrote piano pieces. I wrote some chamber music. I don't think any of that was particularly interesting.

Tod Machover

#39. When we look at a painting, listen to a piece of music, read a novel, or watch a movie we are taking in the artist's composition. The composition is the totality of the work.

Mike Svob

#40. I met my wife when we were both 19 or 20, at a music school where she was taking voice and piano lessons and I was doing classes in music theory and composition.

Rohinton Mistry

#41. Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction.

E.L. Doctorow

#42. I'm pretty optimistic about the future of rock ... it will be back to composition as in classical music or jazz.

Jimmy Page

#43. Like many composers, most of my compositions are influenced by the music I've listened to throughout my life.

Nobuo Uematsu

#44. Monk taught me more about music composition than anyone else on 52nd Street.

Miles Davis

#45. For me, it's important that a movie is the congregate of all art forms, from writing to art composition to music to performing. Trying to keep a balance of all those is what I think a director's job is.

Mick Garris

#46. I studied piano and viola and voice in high school and music composition in college. For many years before I became an author I was a singer songwriter, writing for Disney and Sesame Street. I believe in perfect rhymes - no cheating!

Sarah Weeks

#47. Sir Kenneth MacMillan's version of 'Romeo and Juliet' is my favorite full-length ballet, Sergei Prokofiev's breathtaking score a favorite composition of music. As a student of martial arts, I loved drawing my sword in defense of my Capulet kin.

Sascha Radetsky

#48. Whenever you study composition you inevitably encounter Bach right off the bat. You can't get across the room without running into him and the other greats. Analyzing Bach absolutely influenced my jazz playing.

Howard Roberts

#49. I am in the world only for the purpose of composing.

Franz Schubert

#50. Fogs are like dreams that feed the soul, and without their mysterious embrace, childhood, courtship, poetry and the composition of music become all the more difficult.

Michael Leunig

#51. I hated teaching composition. I was playing music I didn't particularly want to play, being on committees I didn't want to be on.

Richard Rodney Bennett

#52. Most of my music is improvisation, and composition is improvisation. Even if I have a score, it is improvisation.

Yoshi Wada