Composer Quotes - Page 20

• 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

  Strong, Player, Creative

  7 Copy quote

• Pandit Pran Nath has given much of his later life to America and Europe and has influenced many of our younger composers.

  Bernard Holland

  Europe, America, Pandit

  4 Copy quote

• Statistically in the UK, there are so many fewer female composers than male songwriters and they're marketed in a way that - females are marketed in a way that they're these independent unique artists writing their own stuff, and they're not, because fourteen percent of PRS goes to women.

  Kate Nash

  Writing, Independent, Artist

  4 Copy quote

• The humor of jazz is rich and many-sided. Some of it is obvious enough to make a dog laugh. Some is subtle, wry-mouthed, or back-handed. It is by turns bitter, agonized, and grotesque. Even in the hands of white composers it involuntarily reflects the half-forgotten suffering of the negro. Jazz has both white and black elements, and each in some respects has influenced the other. It's recent phase seems to throw the light of the white race's sophistication upon the anguish of the black.

  Bix Beiderbecke

  Dog, Light, Race

  18 Copy quote

• He's not a performer, he's not a composer, he's not even a musician, but Norman Granz is Mr. Jazz.

  Oscar Peterson

  Musician, Jazz, Performers

  19 Copy quote

• Paul McCartney is a genius ... Paul married Rock & Roll to beauty, and forever raised the bar for composers, musicians, and fans ... an incredible solo performer ... the creator of our favorite songs.

  Alec Baldwin

  Song, Rocks, Forever

  4 Copy quote

• But there's a thin line between songwriting and arranging. ... Recording at home enables one to eliminate the demo stage, and the presentation stage in the studio, too. ... And I think it's safe to say that the single very impressive figure to me was Merle Haggard. ... Dylan can do no wrong. ... Glenn Gould was my hero. Glenn Gould was my idol. I loved him. ... I loved Hendrix. I mean, really, really loved him. As if he were one of the great classical composers. And he was. That's how I saw him.

  Warren Zevon

  Hero, Home, Mean

  23 Copy quote

• I went to see 'Phantom of the Opera' with my grandma and my mom when I was very little. The stage, the voice, the music?... Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber has been a massive inspiration to me for some time - the storytelling, that deliciously somber undertone in his music.

  Lady Gaga

  Mom, Grandma, Inspiration

  "Lady Gaga On Love and Lies". Harper's Bazaar Interview, www.harpersbazaar.com. February 5, 2014.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• After I found out that I was playing music and that I'd have to learn how to read and write music, I started doing that about two years later. Finally, I said, "Oh, that means what I really want to do is to be a composer." But when I was coming up in Texas, there was segregation. There was no schools to go to. I taught myself how to read and how to start writing.

  Ornette Coleman

  Writing, School, Mean

  Interview with Michael Jarrett, www2.york.psu.edu. November 8, 1987.

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Thinking, Fields, Sound

  4 Copy quote

• ...stories about [the German composer Johannes] Brahms's rudeness and wit amused me in particular. For instance, I loved the one about how a great wine connoisseur invited the composer to dinner. 'This is the Brahms of my cellar,' he said to his guests, producing a dust-covered bottle and pouring some into the master's glass. Brahms looked first at the color of the wine, then sniffed its bouquet, finally took a sip, and put the glass down without saying a word. 'Don't you like it?' asked the host. 'Hmm,' Brahms muttered. 'Better bring your Beethoven!'

  Arthur Rubinstein

  Wine, Glasses, Dust

  48 Copy quote

• Why should a novelist not also be a historian? To force unnatural divisions within the English language is to work against its capacious and accommodating nature. To expect a writer to produce only novels, or only histories, is equivalent to demanding from a composer that he or she write only string quartets or piano sonatas.

  Peter Ackroyd

  Writing, Piano, Novelists

  4 Copy quote

• I'm less interested in uniqueness than in goodness. I see so many concerts where the program notes are more interesting than the music. I remember talking to one composer who went through the most complicated mathematical algorithm to generate some material from scratch. It took weeks and weeks, and he came up with a C major chord. For me, honesty is more interesting than originality.

  Anna Meredith

  Honesty, Talking, Interesting

  Source: pitchfork.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• With television you are producing hours and hours of music and for film it is a shorter experience for both the audience and for you as a composer.

  Bear McCreary

  Television, Film, Hours

  Source: collider.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Waiting, Musician, Groups

  "Critics' Roundtable: What Was the Cultural Event of 2012?". www.vulture.com. December 2, 201.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• Occasionally I hear a band that blows me away. For instance, there's a musician in Oakland named Weasel Walter who has a band called the Flying Luttenbachers. Go see the Flying Luttenbachers when they're in your town. He's one of the greatest rock composers who ever lived, and he's struggling and living like a poverty-stricken hermit.

  Glenn Branca

  Struggle, Blow, Rocks

  Interview with Simon Dasher, pitchfork.com. April 30, 2006.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• When I was done with high school, I knew that music was really important to me and I knew I didn't want to be a cellist, but I wasn't really sure if I wanted to be a composer, or think about - I was just interested in the ideas behind music, I was interested in mathematics.

  Tod Machover

  School, Thinking, Ideas

  "A Conversation with MIT Lab Inventor & Composer Tod Machover". Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• It is true that I am a writer, and I was married to a composer, and I have lived in a small village in New England, but my children are not named Heracles and Persephone, and my daughter doesn't disappear underground every six months and emerge in the spring.

  Jamaica Kincaid

  Daughter, Mother, Children

  "'Our Sassy Black Friend' Jamaica Kincaid". Interview with Hannah Levintova, www.motherjones.com. January/February 2013.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• As to...old composers like Schubert or Beethoven, I imagine that, while modern music expresses both feeling, thought and imagination, they expressed pure feeling. And you know all day sitting at work, eating, walking, etc., you have hundreds of feelings that can't be put into words. And that is why I think that in a sense music is the highest of the arts, because it really begins where the others leave off.

  C. S. Lewis

  Art, Thinking, Imagination

  6 Copy quote

• On one hand you have a string quartet, which is not a symphony. On the other hand is you have me sampling them and making it sound like there is many more people playing, so the whole notion of, kind of, sampling applied to classical music is very intriguing to me because composers throughout history have borrowed motifs and quotes from one another.

  DJ Spooky

  Hands, Symphony, People

  Source: bigthink.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  World, Missions, Equal

  Source: pitchfork.com

  29 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think actors really like to know what does a casting agent really think or what does a composer really think.

  Julie Halston

  Thinking, Doe, Actors

  Source: www.broadwayworld.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• A composer is not only an architect but also an inventor, and he should not build houses in which he cannot live.

  Igor Stravinsky

  Inspiration, House, Architect

  15 Copy quote

• All great musical composers have been connected, consciously or unconsciously, with this source of music-a fact that enabled them to become masters of their art. Their compositions contain specific messages brought through from high realms for the definite purpose of bettering world conditions and bestowing upon mankind greater illumination.

  Corinne Heline

  Art, Inspiration, Illumination

  6 Copy quote

• A review of his work: His music soon spread throughout Europe, and he was invited to America were he performed the Piano Concerto. He would have wished that he would be remembered as an opera composer, but it was to be his orchestral extravaganzas, mainly the trilogy of Roman pictures that has made his name famous.

  Ottorino Respighi

  Work, Europe, Names

  12 Copy quote