Composer Quotes - Page 27

• When I write, I fall into the zone many writers, painters, musicians, athletes, and craftsmen of all sorts seem to share: In doing something I enjoy and am expert at, deliberate thought falls aside and it is all just THERE. I think of the next word no more than the composer thinks of the next note.

  Roger Ebert

  Fall, Writing, Athlete

  "Transcendence and the Creative Process" by Ann Purcell, www.huffingtonpost.com. October 28, 2015.

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• If I belong to a tradition it is a tradition that makes the masterpiece tell the performer what he should do and not the performer telling the piece what it should be like, or the composer what he ought to have composed.

  Alfred Brendel

  Pieces, Tradition, Should

  "Alfred Brendel, A Personal 75th Birthday Selection" by Anthony Holden, www.theguardian.com. January 7, 2006.

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• Love is the keynote, Joy is the music, Knowledge is the performer, the Infinite All is the composer and audience.

  Sri Aurobindo

  Inspiration, Love Is, Joy

  Sri Aurobindo Mandir, Calcutta, Aurobindo Ghose (1943). “Annual”

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• I used to wish I could write songs like the others - and I've tried but I just can't. I get the words all right, but whenever I think of a tune and sing it to the others they always say 'Yeah, it always sounds like such a thing' and when they point it out I see what they mean. But I did get a part credit as a composer on one - it was called What Goes On.

  Ringo Starr

  Song, Mean, Writing

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• The composer...joins Heaven and Earth with threads of sounds.

  Alan Hovhaness

  Heaven, Sound, Earth

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• Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.

  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

  Spiritual, Doing What You Love, Making Love

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

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• Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.

  Frederic Chopin

  Music, Art, Simple

  "If Not God, Then What? Neuroscience, Aesthetics, and the Origins of the Transcendent". Book by Joshua Fost (p. 93), November 16, 2007.

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• As a composer I could never find use for over 4 or 5 notes in any musical number, and as a playwright most of my plays have two acts because i couldn't think of an idea for the third act.

  George M. Cohan

  Thinking, Play, Ideas

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• I believe that interpretation should be like a transparent glass, a window for the composer's music.

  Vladimir Ashkenazy

  Believe, Glasses, Window

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• The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes - ah, that is where the art resides.

  Artur Schnabel

  Funny, Music, Art

  Quoted in Chicago Daily News, 11 June 1958

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• Elizabeth Lutyens was the first professional composer that I ever knew. I sent someextremely infantile pieces that I I'd written and got marvellous encouragement andinterest from her... she's certainly the English composer who's influenced me themost.

  Richard Rodney Bennett

  Encouragement, Pieces, Firsts

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• Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.

  Ludwig van Beethoven

  Music, Wine, Piano

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• What will be the judgment a century hence concerning the lorded works of our favorite composers today? Inasmuch as nearly everything is subject to the changes of time, and - more's the pity- the fashions of time, only that which is good and true will endure like a rock and no wanton hand will ever venture to defile it. Then, let every man do that which is right, strive with all his might towards the goal which can never be obtained, develop to the last breath the gifts with which the gracious Creator has endowed him, and never cease to learn. For life is short, art eternal.

  Ludwig van Beethoven

  Music, Fashion, Art

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• Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears from the eyes of woman.

  Ludwig van Beethoven

  Music, Eye, Heart

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• The Rhapsody is not a composition at all. It's a string of separate paragraphs stuck together - with a thin paste of flour and water... I don't think there has been such an inspired melodist on this earth since Tchaikovsky... but if you want to speak of a composer, that's another matter.

  Leonard Bernstein

  Thinking, Tchaikovsky, Water

  "Why Don't You Run Upstairs and Write a Nice Gershwin Tune?". The Atlantic Monthly, April 1955.

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• Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music.

  Gioachino Rossini

  Music, Giving, Lists

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• I think of all music as existing in the substance of the air itself. It is the composer's task to order and make sense of sound, in time and space, to communicate something about being alive through music.

  Libby Larsen

  Thinking, Air, Order

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• It all depends on the directors. Working closely with a director is the main job of a film composer. Interpreting what he perceives as a color, an emotion or mood is very abstract. A director tells you something he wants and then you have to run back...

  Danny Elfman

  Running, Jobs, Color

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

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• The new kind of music seems to create not from the heart but from the head. Its composers think rather than feel. They have not the capacity to make their works exalt - they meditate, protest, analyze, reason, calculate and brood, but they do not exalt.

  Sergei Rachmaninoff

  Heart, Thinking, Kind

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• With the new technology that keeps entering the media, film composers are constantly being placed in new learning situations. Acknowledging this and realizing that one must keep up, I maintain, nonetheless, that the real creative power is in the mind and heart of the composer.

  Henry Mancini

  Real, Heart, Technology

  Henry Mancini (2001). “Did They Mention the Music?: The Autobiography of Henry Mancini”, p.185, Cooper Square Press

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• I am proud to be able to claim that, from the age of nineteen, I've managed to earna living entirely as a composer.

  Richard Rodney Bennett

  Age, Nineteen, Proud

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• I am an arrogant and impatient listener, but in the case of a few composers, a very few, when I hear a work I do not like, I am convinced that it is my own fault. Verdi is one of those composers.

  Benjamin Britten

  Music, Arrogant, Faults

  Benjamin Britten, Paul Francis Kildea (2003). “On Music”, p.103, Oxford University Press, USA

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• Not all, but too many of the best writers, composers, and artists of our time begin to be acclaimed only when they no longer have anything to say and take to performing instead of stating.

  Clement Greenberg

  Artist, Recognition, Performing

  Clement Greenberg (1961). “Hofmann: twelve color plates, twenty-one black and white illustrations”

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• I always go back to the original material. I want a good connection as the composer and writer of the score to the director and to the source material. It's really important.

  Howard Shore

  Important, Directors, Connections

  Source: collider.com

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• To be a success as a Broadway composer, you must be Jewish or gay. I'm both.

  Leonard Bernstein

  Gay, Broadway

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