Composer Quotes - Page 24

• If my serenade of song and story should serve as a pillow for some composer's head, as yet perhaps unborn, to dream and build on our fond melodies in his tomorrow, I have not labored in vain.

  William Christopher Handy

  Dream, Song, Stories

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• I was composing before I realised I was a composer. I mean it came more or less naturally.

  Richard Meale

  Mean, Composing, Realised

  "The Music Show" with Andrew Ford, www.abc.net.au. August 24, 2002.

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• The most uninteresting part of the biography of a composer is his childhood. All those preludes are the same and the reader hurries on to the fugue.

  Dmitri Shostakovich

  Childhood, Biographies, Prelude

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• Music is not written in red, white and blue. It is written in the heart's blood of the composer.

  Nellie Melba

  Art, Blue, Blood

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• 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

  Writing, Winter, Would Be

  David Mitchell (2008). “Cloud Atlas”, p.83, Hachette UK

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• 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

  Book, Men, Inspire

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• If music be the food of love, play on.

  William Shakespeare

  Love, Inspirational, Romantic

  'Twelfth Night' (1601) act 1, sc. 1, l. 1

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• As a composer and as a musician I'm a true believer - and this is not to be overly diplomatic - I'm a believer that there's artistry in everything from a lawn gnome to a desk chair to a symphony to an Andy Warhol painting. There's art in absolutely everything.

  Darren Criss

  Art, Symphony, Musician

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• I am a ham. I've no business being rock 'n' roll. I've said it over and over again that I'm a classical composer, dishevelling my personality by dabbling in rock 'n' roll.

  John Cale

  Rocks, Personality, Ham

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• I love Philip Glass' work, not only as a film composer but also as a musician. The film score work that he does always amazes and shocks me.

  Park Chan-wook

  Glasses, Musician, Doe

  "Park Chan-wook Talks Differences Between Korean & American Films, How ‘Stoker’ Fits In With His Filmography & More". Interview with Drew Taylor, www.indiewire.com. March 19, 2013.

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• Has the painter not always gone to an art school, or at least to an established master, for instruction? And the composer, the sculptor, the architect? Then why not the writer? Good poets, like good hybrid corn, are both born and made.

  Paul Engle

  Art, School, Gone

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• Every song has a composer, every book has an author, every car has a maker, every painting has a painter, and every building has a builder. So it isn't irrational to take this simple logic a little further and say that nature must have had a Maker. It would be irrational to believe that it made itself.

  Ray Comfort

  Song, Nature, Believe

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• Pablo Casals is a great musician in all he does: a cellist without equal, and extraordinary conductor and composer with something to say. I have been profoundly impressed by all I have heard of his work, but he is a musician of this stature because he is also a great man.

  Albert Schweitzer

  Men, Musician, Doe

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• I have been told that a young would-be composer wrote to Mozart asking advice about how to compose a symphony. Mozart responded that a symphony was a complex and demanding form and it would be better to start with something simpler. The young man protested, 'But, Herr Mozart, you wrote symphonies when you were younger than I am now.' Mozart replied, 'I never asked how.

  Isaac Asimov

  Men, Symphony, Advice

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• It's easy to play any musical instrument: all you have to do is touch the right key at the right time and the instrument will play itself.

  Johann Sebastian Bach

  Music, Keys, Play

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• As a composer, I believe that music has the power to inspire a renewal of human consciousness, culture, and politics. And yet I refuse to make political art. More often than not political art fails as politics, and all too often it fails as art. To reach its fullest power, to be most moving and most fully useful to us, art must be itself.

  John Luther Adams

  Art, Moving, Believe

  "Making Music in the Anthropocene". www.slate.com. February 24, 2015.

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• If there is anyone here whom I have not insulted, I beg his pardon.

  Johannes Brahms

  Insulted Him, Leaving, Pardon

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• There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between.

  Thomas Beecham

  Funny, Music, Two

  In Harold Atkins and Archie Newman Beecham Stories (1978) p. 27

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• I don't think a guy that really has no understanding about people, or has no interest in understanding people would make a good film composer.

  Stanley Clarke

  Thinking, People, Guy

  "Films Come to Life with Stanley Clarke's Music". "News & Notes" with Farai Chideya, www.npr.org. February 15, 2008.

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• If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.

  Simon Rattle

  Music, Piano, Composing

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• Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.

  Ludwig van Beethoven

  Music, Knowledge, World

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

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• Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

  Ludwig van Beethoven

  Music, Writing, Thank God

  Letter to Ferdinand Ries, 20 Dec. 1822

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• What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.

  Ludwig van Beethoven

  Birth, Composing Music, Thousand

  Letter to Prince Karl Lichnowsky, 1806

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• You can't possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh and go slow. (Oscar trying to talk his way out of a speeding ticket)

  Oscar Levant

  Music, Trying, Movement

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• If you don't live it, it won't come out your horn.

  Charlie Parker

  Music, Art, Reality

  Quoted in Nat Shapiro and Nat Hentoff, Hear Me Talkin' to Ya (1955)

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