Composer Quotes - Page 15

• A great ancient poet was blind. A great classical composer was deaf. Many of us are dumb. What have we to show for it?

  Vera Nazarian

  Dumb, Ancient, Blind

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• At the same time, one of the things I noticed was that the moment there was any kind of audio attached to virtual reality, it really improved the experience, even though the audio didn't feel like a sound engineer or composer had been anywhere near it.

  Thomas Dolby

  Reality, Sound, Audio

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• Each time a dancer moves devoutly or a composer faithfully searches the silence for the veiled melodies, eternity is engaged.

  Maya Angelou

  Moving, Silence, Dancer

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• Composers tend to assume that everyone loves music. Surprisingly enough, everyone doesn’t.

  Aaron Copland

  Assuming, Music Love, One Love

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• I will gladly give lessons as a favor, particularly when I see that my student has talent, inclination, and anxiety to learn; but to be obliged to go to a house at a certain hour, or to have to wait at home for a pupil, is what I cannot do, no matter how much money it may bring me in. . . I am a composer and was born to be a Kapellmeister. I neither can nor ought to bury the talent for composition with which God in his goodness has so richly endowed me. . .

  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

  Home, Giving, House

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

  Joseph Haydn

  Son, Men, Skills

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• As a composer seeking to remain anonymous I am shy of confessing my musical activity. This is intelligible enough. For others it is their chief business, the occupation and aim of life. For me it is a relaxation, a pastime which distracts me from my principal business, my professorship. I love my profession and my science. I love the Academy and my pupils, male and female, because to direct the work of young people, one must be close to them.

  Alexander Borodin

  People, Relaxation, Musical

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• The Violins waltzed. The Cellos and Basses provided accompaniment. The Violas mourned their fate, while the Concertmaster showed off. The Flutes did bird imitations…repeatedly, and the reed instruments had the good taste to admire my jacket. The Trumpets held a parade in honor of our great nation, while the French Horns waxed nostalgic about something or other. The Trombones had too much to drink. The Percussion beat the band, and the Tuba stayed home playing cards with his landlady, the Harp, taking sips of warm milk a blue little cup. “But the Composer is still dead.

  Daniel Handler

  Home, Fate, Blue

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• ... Andres Segovia literally created the genre of classical guitar, which hadn't existed before around 1910. There was flamenco, which he borrowed from, but he actually arranged the works of Mozart and other classical composers for guitar, something that had never been done before ... Segovias' style is not slick or contrived, but it's still very clean and his timing is impeccable ... it's got a feeling of casual elegance, as if he's sitting around the house in Spain with a jug of wine, just playing from the heart.

  Roger McGuinn

  Music, Heart, Wine

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• The composers hated me. The singers detested me. The guitarists were terrified by me.

  Bulat Okudzhava

  Singers, Hated, Terrified

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• If a composer suffers from loss of sleep and his sleeplessness induces him to turn out masterpieces, what a profitable loss it is!

  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  Sleep, Loss, Suffering

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• To talk about communication theory without communicating its real mathematical content would be like endlessly telling a man about a wonderful composer, yet never letting him hear an example of the composer's music.

  John R. Pierce

  Real, Communication, Science

  John R. Pierce (2012). “An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise”, p.10, Courier Corporation

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• There’s no card, business card, better than a compact disc for a composer. It doesn’t half impress people and they get a long way on it ... these composers they will get more performances, more commissions, more recognition just by having that disc

  Peter Maxwell Davies

  Long, People, Cards

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• There is more to creative mastership than the surface of satisfaction and political certainty. The music of Joe Fonda is part of a living tradition of belief and dedication. Future historians will be surprised at the breadth of Mr. Fonda's offerings. This is a real virtuoso and composer of the highest order.

  Anthony Braxton

  Real, Dedication, Offering

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• Man has used human rhythmic movement as raw material out of which to create works of art, as the composer of music uses sound, the sculptor uses stone and wood, the painter his pigments, and the writer - words.

  Ted Shawn

  Dance, Art, Men

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• I always wanted to be a spontaneous composer.

  Charles Mingus

  Music, Jazz, Spontaneous

  "What Is A Jazz Composer?". Charles Mingus' liner notes for "Let My Children Hear Music", album composed by Charles Mingus, January/February 1972.

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• If we compel the composer to write in terms of what the listener is able to hear, we flirt with the danger of freezing the evolution of musical language, whose progressive development comes about through transgressions of a given era's perceptual habits."

  Jean-Jacques Nattiez

  Music, Writing, Flirting

  Jean-Jacques Nattiez (1990). “Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music”, p.99, Princeton University Press

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• I had been to São Paulo the year before and became pretty well acquainted with the music of composer Antonio Carlos Jobim, I had already started playing that music, and the audience response had been pretty good because those songs are so melodic. I knew it would be something that would be appealing; I wasn't thinking that it would make the top of the pop charts or anything like that.

  Charlie Byrd

  Music, Song, Thinking

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• Bad facts make bad law, and people who write bad laws are in my opinion more dangerous than songwriters who celebrate sexuality. Freedom of speech, freedom of religious thought, and the right to due process for composers, performers and retailers are imperiled if the PMRC and the major labels consummate this nasty bargain.

  Frank Zappa

  Religious, Writing, Law

  Frank Zappa, Peter Occhiogrosso (1990). “Real Frank Zappa Book”, p.276, Simon and Schuster

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• Out of the choked Devonian waters emerged sight and sound and the music that rolls invisible through the composer's brain. They are there still in the ooze along the tideline, though no one notices. The world is fixed, we say: fish in the sea, birds in the air. But in the mangrove swamps by the Niger, fish climb trees and ogle uneasy naturalists who try unsuccessfully to chase them back to the water. There are things still coming ashore.

  Loren Eiseley

  Sight, Air, Sea

  Loren Eiseley (2011). “The Immense Journey: An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature”, p.54, Vintage

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• Freddie Bryant is a brilliant young guitarist and composer.

  Kenny Burrell

  Brilliant, Young, Guitarist

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• Wynton Marsalis' skills have grown as fast as his ambition, and he is the most ambitious younger composer in Jazz.

  Jon Pareles

  Ambition, Skills, Ambitious

  "Review/Jazz; Wynton Marsalis Takes a Long Look at Slavery". www.nytimes.com. April 04, 1994.

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• ... The 'cleverness' syndrome has taken the place of melody. It's like everyone has come down with this terrible disease in jazz....you are always expected to do your own material, which is a strange thing to do if you're a poor composer but a great player.

  Keith Jarrett

  Taken, Player, Musician

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• These days I think the composers of music influence me more than any photographers or visual creators. I see something exciting or lovely and think to myself: 'If Papa Haydn or Wolfgang Amadeus or the red-headed Vivaldi were here with a camera, they'd snap a picture of what's in front of me.' So I take the picture for them.

  Ralph Steiner

  Thinking, Lovely, Cameras

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• If the reader were so rash as to purchase any of Bela Bartok's compositions, he would find that they each and all consist of unmeaning bunches of notes, apparently representing the composer promenading the keyboard in his boots. Some can be played better with the elbows, others with the flat of the hand. None require fingers to perform or ears to listen too.

  Frederick Corder

  Hands, Musical, Boots

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