Composer Quotes - Page 21

• I think, you know, for someone who does play, let's say, old music or, you know, Baroque music or Renaissance music - and you know, and I do play a lot of that, obviously - engaging with new composers, engaging with young composers, is really exciting because it makes me look at people of the past in a very different way that they are also living, that there was a lot of subjectivity in the decisions that they were making.

  Mahan Esfahani

  Past, Thinking, Play

  "How To Annoy Your Dad: Play The Harpsichord". "All Things Considered" with Robert Siegel, www.npr.org. December 29, 2015.

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• The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance. Like music also, it is fulfilled in each moment of its course. You do not play a sonata in order to reach the final chord, and if the meaning of things were simply in ends, composers would write nothing but finales.

  Alan Watts

  Spiritual, Writing, Order

  Alan Watts (1951). “The Wisdom of Insecurity”, Vintage

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• Too many composers become involved in intellectual speculation which seems to matter more to them than the sound that comes out of all this speculation.

  Louise Talma

  Meditation, Intellectual, Sound

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• I came up in the '60s; that was a time when there was a revolution going on in music. Stravinsky had become a twelve-tone composer; even Aaron Copland was writing twelve-tone pieces at that time!

  Paul Lansky

  Writing, Twelve, Pieces

  Source: therumpus.net

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• There are, however, composers whose music can only be heard in a chromatic sense. George Perle, for example, wrote pieces that you might think of as leaning in a tonal direction but it's very hard to register a pitch as, say, the sixth degree of a scale, whereas in much of my music I think that's often relatively easy to do.

  Paul Lansky

  Thinking, Example, Pieces

  Source: therumpus.net

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

  Nobuo Uematsu

  Composition

  Source: www.ign.com

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• Notes are part of life for any composer for hire. There's no way around it. I think anyone who has done even a small number of films as a professional composer gets used to that idea pretty quickly.

  Christophe Beck

  Thinking, Numbers, Ideas

  Source: collider.com

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• To be a great composer requires immense experience... One acquires this by listening not only to other men's work, but above all to one's own!

  Frederic Chopin

  Music, Men, Listening

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• Just as composers go to concerts and artists visit galleries, writers read. You will learn, in the most enjoyable way, more about style and language from reading good literature than you will ever acquire from workshops and how-to books.

  Judith Barrington

  Reading, Book, Artist

  Judith Barrington (2002). “Writing the Memoir”

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• 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

  Writing, Credit, Likes

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• I cannot listen to Beethoven or Mahler or Chopin or Bach when I write because those composers require you stop what you are doing and listen.

  Antonio Damasio

  Writing, Mahler

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• So, it becomes an exercise in futility if you write something that does not express the film as the director wishes. It's still their ball game. It's their show. I think any successful composer learns how to dance around the director's impulses.

  Danny Elfman

  Writing, Exercise, Successful

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• I write arrangements. Im sort of a wannabe composer.

  Joshua Bell

  Writing, Wannabes, Arrangements

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• I just wanted to be a composer; I became an actor by default, really. I got a scholarship to a college of music and drama, hoping to take a scholarship in music. But I ended up as an acting student, so I've stuck with that for the last 50-odd years.

  Anthony Hopkins

  Drama, College, Years

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• The three greatest composers are Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. All the others are cretins.

  Hans von Bulow

  Three, Brahms

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• A whole generation of veteran composers has never taken a stand or provided an example and has produced in the music academies generations of docile workers for the music industry. What can you expect from downtrodden workers who see music as a type of profession, like stenography, and not an act of creation that by its nature is subversive?

  Itay Talgam

  Taken, Example, Generations

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• Have you seen a symphony orchestra? There is a person at the back carrying a triangle. Now and again the conductor will point to him or her and that person will play "ting." That might seem so insignificant, but in the conception of the composer something irreplaceable would be lost to the total beauty of the symphony if that "ting" did not happen.

  Desmond Tutu

  Play, Symphony, Community

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• I just scribbled away and eventually a C-major chord was there. I didn't ever decide I was going to be a composer. It was like being tall. It's what I was. It's what I did.

  Richard Rodney Bennett

  Chords, Tall, Majors

  "A life in music: Richard Rodney Bennett". Interview with Nicholas Wroe, www.theguardian.com. July 22, 2011.

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• 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

  Thinking, People, Use

  "Remixing Philip Glass". Interview with Zachary Woolfe, www.nytimes.com. October 5, 2012.

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• To make a film, the final big collaborator that you have is the composer.

  Paul Thomas Anderson

  Finals, Film, Bigs

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• The model of a composer.

  Benjamin Britten

  Music, Models

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• Stravinsky the composer I worship. Stravinsky the thinker I despise.

  Dmitri Shostakovich

  Worship, Despise, Stravinsky

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• It is the power of music to carry one directly into the mental state of the composer.

  Ludwig van Beethoven

  States, Power Of Music

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• I can think and play stuff in classical music that possibly violinists who didn't have access to other types of music could never do. It means I'm more flexible within classical music, to be a servant to the composer.

  Nigel Kennedy

  Mean, Thinking, Play

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• Writers, Composers, Painters, - also artists like directors and actors fall into the same category. They have to be handled with kid gloves, mentally and physically

  Marlene Dietrich

  Fall, Kids, Artist

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