Composer Quotes - Page 26

• The fact that certain composers have been able to create first-class music within the medium of film proves that film music can be as good as the composer is gifted.

  Jerry Goldsmith

  Class, Able, Firsts

  "Music for the Movies". Book by Tony Thomas, p. 209, 1973.

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• Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.

  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

  Love, Marriage, Flower

  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Metropolitan Opera (New York, N.Y.) (1971). “Chagall at the Met”, Leon Amiel Publisher

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• My favorite instrument is the snare drum. In Scotland, the snare drum is very prominent in Highland bands. The Scottish style of playing is in my blood. It's a very powerful instrument, but it can also be soothing, like velvet. It's a real challenge for composers.

  Evelyn Glennie

  Powerful, Real, Blood

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• A large part of my work has been collaborating with composers; I think we've commissioned about 140 pieces now, a lot of them percussion concertos.

  Evelyn Glennie

  Thinking, Pieces, Percussion

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• I believe that traditional wisdom is incomplete. A composer can have all the talent of Mozart and a passionate desire to succeed, but if he believes he cannot compose music, he will come to nothing. He will not try hard enough. He will give up too soon when the elusive right melody takes too long to materialize.

  Martin Seligman

  Giving Up, Believe, Passionate Desire

  Martin E. P. Seligman (1998). “Learned Optimism”, Free Press

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• The number of e-mails and letters that I get from choreographers, from sculptors, from composers who are being inspired by science is huge.

  Brian Greene

  Numbers, Letters, Mail

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• I couldn't say I ever dreamt of becoming a composer, a pianist, or anything else for that matter. I have the kind of brain where nothing is set in stone.

  Anthony Hopkins

  Brain, Stones, Matter

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• When I listen to a symphony I love, I don't get from it what the composer got. His 'Yes' was different from mine. He could have no concern for mine and no exact conception of it. That answer is too personal to each man. But in giving himself what he wanted, he gave me a great experience.

  Ayn Rand

  Men, Symphony, Giving

  Ayn Rand (2005). “The Fountainhead”, p.514, Penguin

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• Perhaps within the next hundred years, science will perfect a process of thought transference from composer to listener. The composer will sit alone on the concert stage and merely 'think' his idealized conception of his music. Instead of recordings of actual music sound, recordings will carry the brainwaves of the composer directly to the mind of the listener.

  Raymond Scott

  Thinking, Years, Perfect

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

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• Jerry Goldsmith is an artist who meets all the demands upon the composer in films. He communicates, integrates, subordinates, supports, and designs with discipline.

  Jerry Goldsmith

  Artist, Discipline, Design

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• Music is at once the product of feeling and knowledge.

  Alban Berg

  Feelings, Music Is, Performers

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• It is a pleasant surprise to him (the pure mathematician) and an added problem if he finds that the arts can use his calculations, or that the senses can verify them, much as if a composer found that sailors could heave better when singing his songs.

  George Santayana

  Song, Art, Math

  George Santayana (2014). “Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy”, p.81, Cambridge University Press

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• There are great jazz educators that I meet all the time. I met a guy named Paul Luchessi who has a high school jazz program in Fresno. And Bob Athayde who runs a junior high program in Lafayette, California. And man, we walked into these schools and Paul Luchessi said, "Jon is the composer of Paradox." A hundred or something kids started to applaud. "What? You guys know that? I'm so blown away.

  Jon Gordon

  Running, School, Kids

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• I sometimes think that the most plaintive ditty has brought a fuller joy and of longer duration to its composer that the conquest of Persia to the Macedonian.

  Walter Savage Landor

  Thinking, Joy, Duration

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• I knew I could never be accepted as a straight-ahead jazz musician, nor would Iaccept myself as that. I would never be accepted as a minimalist. I wouldn't be adowntown composer. Because I find all orthodoxies, all doctrines to be ultimatelybanal.

  Anthony Davis

  Musician, Doctrine, Orthodoxy

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• I think the purpose of a piece of music is significant when it actually lives in somebody else. A composer puts down a code, and a performer can activate the code in somebody else. Once it lives in somebody else, it can live in others as well.

  Yo-Yo Ma

  Thinking, Purpose, Pieces

  Interview with Elijah Ho, www.thecounterpoints.com. January 7, 2013.

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• You always hear these stories of how Hollywood is so merciless on composers and how they all get beaten up. Nobody beats me up as much as I beat myself up. This is what I love doing and I have one life to do it in, and I better do it right. I better do it well.

  Hans Zimmer

  Hollywood, Stories, Beats

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• My husband is a composer, so he plays piano all the time and I sit there and clap telling my unborn child, 'Hear me clap, hear the music.' I know music, in general, is supposed to be good for babies to hear.

  Danica McKellar

  Baby, Children, Husband

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• Most of the arts, as painting, sculpture, and music, have emotional appeal to the general public. This is because these arts can be experienced by some one or more of our senses. Such is not true of the art of mathematics; this art can be appreciated only by mathematicians, and to become a mathematician requires a long period of intensive training. The community of mathematicians is similar to an imaginary community of musical composers whose only satisfaction is obtained by the interchange among themselves of the musical scores they compose.

  Cornelius Lanczos

  Art, Math, Emotional

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• The composer opens the cage door for arithmetic, the draftsman gives geometry its freedom.

  Jean Cocteau

  Freedom, Math, Doors

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• The use of electronics is a natural extension of the instrument - it is an electric guitar. So we guitarists have been plugging into something since 1931, and we are not about to stop now. Current advances in technology means we can have a huge array of sounds at our fingertips, and this offers amazing possibilities to the contemporary composer. It is always a guitar (I don't play synthesizer) but it becomes something else all together - more like sculpting sound in real time using metal wires, 5 fingers and a pick.

  Tim Brady

  Real, Mean, Technology

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• It is possible I never learned the names of birds in order to discover the bird of peace, the bird of paradise, the bird of the soul, the bird of desire. It is possible I avoided learning the names of composers and their music the better to close my eyes and listen to the mystery of all music as an ocean. It may be I have not learned dates in history in order to reach the essence of timelessness. It may be I never learned geography the better to map my own routes and discover my own lands. The unknown was my compass. The unknown was my encyclopedia. The unnamed was my science and progress.

  Anais Nin

  Ocean, Eye, Order

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• All great composers of the past spent most of their time studying. Feeling alone won't do the job. A man also needs technique.

  George Gershwin

  Jobs, Past, Men

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• You think about, like, [20th-century classical composers] Alban Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern sitting around in some living room in Vienna and being like, "We are the end of music. We are the end of this tradition. Music is done."

  David Longstreth

  Thinking, Sitting, Done

  "Dirty Projectors". Interview with Brandon Stosuy, pitchfork.com. July 2, 2012.

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• In fact, if you take any group of scores, it's likely that fifty to sixty percent are going to be so much alike that it's difficult to tell any difference among them. But I sometimes wonder if that has more to do with the quality of the art that's being made. There are always those composers who are going to move toward whatever is currently in fashion, there are others who will deliberately attempt to go in another direction. And sometimes, there are composers who will see themselves as being outside the stream and not even try to present their music to the general public.

  Jennifer Higdon

  Fashion, Art, Moving

  Source: therumpus.net

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