Quotes About Music By Composers

#1. 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

#2. With recording, everything changed. The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one's furniture. It's an idea that many composers have felt reluctant about because it seemed to them to diminish the importance of music.

Brian Eno

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. Since Mozart's day composers have learned the art of making music throatily and palpitatingly sexual.

Aldous Huxley

#13. Composers shouldn't think too much - it interferes with their plagiarism.

Howard Dietz

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself, in a sense, in the mid 1960s really, when I first heard composers like Terry Riley, and when I first started playing with tape recorders.

Brian Eno

#17. I'm more encouraged by the saplings: new music groups, tiny new venues, entrepreneurial musician-composers who aren't waiting to be discovered but are instead building their own Establishment.

David Edelstein

#18. More significant than the fact that poets write abstrusely, painters paint abstractly, and composers compose unintelligible music is that people should admire what they cannot understand; indeed, admire that which has no meaning or principle.

Eric Hoffer

#19. I grew up not really listening to guitar players. Especially when I was studying music, I was just interested in piano players and arrangers and composers; I came to playing in a band from the perspective of someone who never expected to play guitar in a band.

Daniel Rossen

#20. Composers today get a TV script on Friday and have to record on Tuesday. It's just dreadful to impose on gifted talent and expect decent music under these conditions.

Alex North

#21. Film composers are the most prolific music makers on this planet, and most of us are, like, losing our minds if we're doing five or more movies in a year.

Christopher Young

#22. Isn't the point of music to move listeners?"
Mattison smiled. "No. The point of music is to wake listeners up. To break all our ready-made habits."
"And tradition?"
"Real composers make their own.

Richard Powers

#23. I grew up on Bach and Beethoven, and now I'm listening to more modern composers who I can't even name. But since I'm constantly doing music, it's difficult to have that quality time to listen to music and do classical stuff.

A.R. Rahman

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. There's always been good and bad music. Many composers hide behind modern music in order to not make music.

Pepe Romero

#29. 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

#30. I don't use composers. I research music the way I research the photographs or the facts in my scripts.

Ken Burns

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. The musical equivalent of St Pancras Station.
(on Elgar)

Thomas Beecham

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. He was a six and a half foot scowl.
(on Rachmaninov)

Igor Stravinsky

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. All Bach's last movements are like the running of a sewing machine.
(on Bach)

Arnold Bax

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. 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

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

Nobuo Uematsu

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. Composers often think in terms of music and not of an instrument itself.

Michala Petri