Composer Quotes - Page 23

• If you only do little clusters - three or four songs by one, and another, and then yet another - you lose the opportunity to think your way into the composer's mind, since, after all, most of these pieces are quite brief.

  Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

  Song, Opportunity, Thinking

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• When I was 20, Shostakovich was my favorite composer. I still find his Fifth Symphony wonderful, with its outstanding themes and rhythms. That's the piece that made me want to be a classical composer.

  Dave Brubeck

  Symphony, Want, Pieces

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• I am not a composer of music; I sing pieces which have been written for me which gives me bigger freedom to search for pieces I want to record.

  Sarah Brightman

  Giving, Pieces, Records

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• 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

  Keys, Musical, Emotion

  "How we made: Michael Nyman and Jane Campion on The Piano". Interview with Anna Tims, www.theguardian.com. July 30, 2012.

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• Almost all the producers I know and dig, like Quincy Jones or Brian Eno, are really musicians first. I'm a composer, an orchestrator, an arranger and a musician first. I know how to write and rewrite songs, and the genius is really in the rewriting.

  Nile Rodgers

  Song, Writing, Genius

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• For me personally - because I do it myself - the scoring of a picture is fun. I edit the picture and when I've finished I go into my room and I have many many records - jazz, classical and popular music. And I have this all at my disposal. I don't have to get a composer.

  Woody Allen

  Fun, Records, Rooms

  Interview with Geoff Andrew, www.theguardian.com. September 27, 2001.

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• When I'm writing a play I hear it like music. I use the same indications that a composer does for duration. There's a difference, I tell my students, between a semi-colon and a period. A difference in duration. And we have all these wonderful things, we use commas and underlining and all the wonderful punctuation things we can use in the same way a composer uses them in music. And we can indicate, as specifically as a composer, the way we want our piece to sound.

  Edward Albee

  Writing, Play, Differences

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• I got myself into a lovely little shall we say controversy with André Breton, by pointing out that the discipline of spontaneity, which he was asking his surrealist neophytes to adopt, was new for language but something that composers had been practicing for centuries.

  Virgil Thomson

  Discipline, Lovely, Asking

  Virgil Thomson (1984). “A Virgil Thomson reader”, Plume

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• Many consider that Shostakovich is the greatest 20th-century composer. In his 15 symphonies, 15 quartets, and in other works he demonstrated mastery of the largest and most challenging forms with music of great emotional power and technical invention...All his works are marked by emotional extremes - tragic intensity, grotesque and bizarre wit, humour, parody, and savage sarcasm.

  Dmitri Shostakovich

  Sarcasm, Emotional, Symphony

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• What [Tulio Serafin] said that impressed me was: "When one wants to find a gesture, when you want to find how to act on stage, all you have to do is listen to the music. The composer has already seen to that." If you take the trouble to really listen with your soul and with your ears - and I say soul and ears because the mind must work, but not too much also - you will find every gesture there. And it is all true, you know.

  Maria Callas

  Soul, Mind, Ears

  "Maria Callas: The Callas Conversations" by Maria Callas. an Interview in Paris with Lord Harewood for the BBC (April 1968). EMI Classics DVD, 2004.

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• I am under no illusion that I will ever be the greatest opera composer in the world, with Wagner and Verdi and Strauss before me. I think my work could fit very nicely into musicals, though.

  Rufus Wainwright

  Thinking, World, Opera

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• Thorny compositions that sound as if female teen punkers the Shaggs received doctorates in the music of 12-tone composer Alban Berg, and then rewrote their Philosophy of the World.... Carefully notated structures and interplay morph effortlessly into free improvisation that is intelligent and expressive, but never self-indulgent. Also featuring intense lyrics sung with their clear and melodic voices, the two women make transcendent chamber music outside of any genre.

  Elliott Sharp

  Philosophy, Intelligent, Two

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

  Michael Tilson Thomas

  Music Is, Your Favorite

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• I would like to see more new productions of new material by new composers/lyricists/book writers. I would like to see people take more chances. I think because everything costs so much they're not taking the chances they used to.

  Harold Prince

  Book, Thinking, People

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• No composer has yet caught this rhythm of America - it is too mighty for the ears of most.

  Isadora Duncan

  Music, America, Ears

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• 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

  Country, Reflection, Receiving

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• A person taking stock in middle age is like an artist or composer looking at an unfinished work; but whereas the composer and the painter can erase some of their past efforts, we cannot. We are stuck with what we have lived through. The trick is to finish it with a sense of design and a flourish rather than to patch up the holes or merely to add new patches to it.

  Harry S. Broudy

  Past, Artist, Unfinished Work

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• The composer Stravinsky had written a new piece with a difficult violin passage. After it had been in rehearsal for several weeks, the solo violinist came to Stravinsky and said he was sorry, he had tried his best, the passage was too difficult, no violinist could play it. Stravinsky said, 'I understand that. What I am after is the sound of someone trying to play it.'

  Thomas Powers

  Sorry, Play, Trying

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• The prerequisite of contrapuntal art, more conspicuous in the work of Bach than in that of any other composer, is an ability to conceive a priori of melodic identities which when transposed, inverted, made retrograde, or transformed rhythmically will yet exhibit, in conjunction with the original subject matter, some entirely new but completely harmonious profile.

  Glenn Gould

  Art, Identity, Matter

  "Song: 'So You Want To Write A Fugue'". 1997.

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• As a major contemporary composer, Madonna should not let the eye dictate to the ear.

  Camille Paglia

  Eye, Ears, Should

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• There are wonderful composers and librettists out there. It's the lack of creative producers that is troubling.

  Harold Prince

  Creative, Wonderful, Producers

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• Modern European composers...have very largely received their stimulus, their rhythms and impulses from Machine Age America. They have a much older tradition of musical technique which has helped them put into musical terms a little more clearly the thoughts that originated here. They can express themselves more glibly.

  George Gershwin

  America, Musical, Age

  "The Composer in the Machine Age". Book by George Gershwin (p. 386), 1933.

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• I was composing before I realised I was a composer. It came more or less naturally. There were a couple of old ladies lived next door to me, and I frequented their house more than I did my own, because it had all those marvellous things in that that old ladies do have. And they had a piano, and I used to play around with that; they showed me how to read music and I used to play to them.

  Richard Meale

  Couple, Doors, Play

  Source: www.abc.net.au

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• Thank you, Wes... You've been a great inspiration. You are like a conductor. You are like a composer... You inspire us, all of us... If it wasn't for you...I couldn't have done it this way.

  Milena Canonero

  Inspiration, Inspire, Done

  Milena Canonero's Academy Awards Acceptance Speech, aaspeechesdb.oscars.org. February 22, 2015.

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• The present day composer refuses to die.

  Edgard Varese

  Refuse, Present Day, Dies

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