Quotes About Music Composers

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. Composers are the only people who can hear good music above bad sounds.

John Philip Sousa

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. Fortunately, I started very young, so I read music very well. And my favorite composers to play are Brahms and Mozart.

Condoleezza Rice

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#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. 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

#17. 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

#18. A brilliant mind was first a listener that observed the actions of the people that loved and hated them, then found a way to express their feelings, when real communication was lost.

Shannon L. Alder

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. Composers tend to assume that everyone loves music. Surprisingly enough, everyone doesn't.

Aaron Copland

#22. 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

#23. History's greatest composers would be appalled to hear their greatest works reduced to distorted hold music for businesses.

Michael P. Naughton

#24. 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

#25. I think the tendency to paint composers or styles of music with too broad a brush - for example, identifying composers as writers of "simple" or "complex" music - has become increasingly problematic and is almost never productive.

Michael Hersch

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. You can't have Bach, Mozart and Beethoven as your favorite composers. They simply define what music is!

Michael Tilson Thomas

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. [If] it were possible to watch composing in the same way that one can watch painting, if composers could have _ateliers_ as did painters, then it would be clear how superfluous the music theorist is and how he is just as harmful as the art academies.

Arnold Schoenberg

#37. 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

#38. Quincy Jones' autobiography 'Q' is very good. Because he's a master at music, he's one of our greatest composers, and its good for him to have a book and tell the good ole days when he was with Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan and Ray Charles.

Ice Cube

#39. Jazz has been such a force in music, that any musician, including classical composers, have been influenced, and obviously performers, also.

Yo-Yo Ma

#40. Stravinsky is one of the greatest composers of our time and I truly love many of his works. ( ... ) The marvellous composer has invariably been at the centre of my attention, and I not only studied and listened to his music, but I played it and made my own transcriptions as well.

Dmitri Shostakovich

#41. Since music is a reflection of our mindset and our culture, it is bound to change with time. I am glad that India is such a receiving country and is always open to all kinds of music. Our composers, singers and writers are open to experimenting.

Sonu Nigam

#42. I feel that I belong to the 19th century. Some composers' music is very topical. It almost says, 'This is about what I read in newspapers yesterday.' Not mine.

Gordon Getty

#43. 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

#44. Think it a vile habit to alter works of good composers, to omit parts of them, or to insert new-fashioned ornaments. This is the greatest insult you can offer to Art.

Robert Schumann

#45. DEAFNESS DOESN'T PREVENT COMPOSERS HEARING THE MUSIC. IT PREVENTS THEM HEARING THE DISTRACTIONS.

Terry Pratchett

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. 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

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

Nobuo Uematsu

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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

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

Arnold Bax

#59. 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

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

Pepe Romero

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

Michala Petri

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

Igor Stravinsky

#63. 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

#64. 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

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

Thomas Beecham

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. 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

#69. 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

#70. 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

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

Ken Burns

#72. 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

#73. 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

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. 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

#82. 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

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

Howard Dietz

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

Aldous Huxley

#85. Many contemporary composers have been building walls of sounds following their own clever devices. But then, who lives inside those rooms?

Toru Takemitsu

#86. 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

#87. 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

#88. 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

#89. 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

#90. 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

#91. 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

#92. 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

#93. 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

#94. 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

#95. 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