Composer Quotes - Page 29

• One is seduced and battered in turn. The result is presumably wisdom. Wisdom! We are clinging to life like lizards. Why is it so difficult to assemble those things that really matter in life and to dwell among them only? I am referring to certain landscapes, persons, beasts, books, rooms, meteorological conditions, fruits. In fact, I insist on it. A letter is like a poem, it leaps into life and shows very clearly the marks, perhaps I should say thumbprints, of an unwilling or unready composer.

  James Salter

  Book, Landscape, Letters

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• Music is indeed the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

  Ludwig van Beethoven

  Music, Spiritual, Wisdom

  Attributed to Ludwig van Beethoven by Bettina von Arnim in a letter to Goethe (May 28, 1810), as quoted in Bettina von Arnim "Goethe's Correspondence with a Child", 1835.

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• The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music they should be taught to love it instead.

  Igor Stravinsky

  Music, Appreciation, Humorous

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

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• I hope people just enjoy the music. I'm not worried about any sort of legacy. Whether people view me more as the drummer in Wilco or as a composer who composes primarily for rhythmic reasons - it doesn't matter to me as long as they dig the music. None of that matters to me if the music is crap.

  Glenn Kotche

  Views, Long, People

  Interview with Grayson Currin, pitchfork.com. June 5, 2006.

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• I grew up not really listening to guitar players. Especially when I was studying music, I was just interested in piano players and arrangers and composers; I came to playing in a band from the perspective of someone who never expected to play guitar in a band.

  Daniel Rossen

  Player, Guitar, Piano

  "Grizzly Bear". Interview with Mark Richardson, pitchfork.com. October 3, 2012.

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• It's a myth that you need to understand all the ins and outs of music. The ideal scenario is you have a conceptual, directorial conversation about what you're trying to achieve in a theme and then trust your composer to go ahead and do that.

  Henry Jackman

  Trying, Needs, Achieve

  Source: collider.com

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• The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working. Beethoven, Wagner, Bach and Mozart settled down day after day to the job in hand with as much regularity as an accountant settles down each day to his figures. They didn't waste time waiting for inspiration.

  Ernest Newman

  Jobs, Work, Inspiration

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• Mozart in his music was probably the most reasonable of the world's great composers. It is the happy balance between flight and control, between sensibility and self-discipline, simplicity and sophistication of style that is his particular province... Mozart tapped once again the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breath-taking rightness that has never since been duplicated.

  Aaron Copland

  Self, Discipline, Simplicity

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• Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.

  Igor Stravinsky

  Funny, Music, Witty

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

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• My entire education in music was in reading interviews with bands like Stereolab and finding out about Brazilian music or a Romanian composer. You expose yourself to what people you look up to admire.

  Bradford Cox

  Reading, People, Looks

  Source: www.buzzfeed.com

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• The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer; but when the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again.

  William Beebe

  Art, Inspiration, Hard Work

  "The Bird: Its Form and Function". Book by William Beebe, 1906.

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• This whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, “Is there a meaning to music?” My answer to that would be, “Yes.” And “Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?” My answer to that would be, “No.”

  Aaron Copland

  Music, Jazz, States

  "What to Listen For in Music".

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• Composers and musicians have always starved and, as this is a sentimental country, we think the tradition should be continued.

  Thomas Beecham

  Country, Thinking, Musical

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• Communists love to make films about composers, because composers compose music and don't talk subversive things.

  Milos Forman

  Film, Communist

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• Virgil Thomson, the great classical music critic, who was also a composer, but said that criticism was the only antidote he knew to pay publicity. Critics at their best are independent voices people take seriously their responsibility to see as many things as they can see, put them in the widest possible perspective, educate their readers, I really do think of myself as a teacher. Newspapers that don't carry arts criticism at all while not fulfill this function. And probably their arts journalism will be deprived as a result.

  Terry Teachout

  Teacher, Art, Independent

  Source: bigthink.com

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• The most important thing to remember is that the composer is a senior partner. You cannot force a subject on a composer if it doesn't inspire him. He has to take the lead, you are an enabler, and you are creating the enabling conditions under which he can write great music. Your words are secondary. Many librettists in opera collaborations in the past have forgotten this, or not known it, or refuse to accept it and tried to get out in front of the creative process and it just doesn't work that way.

  Terry Teachout

  Senior, Writing, Past

  Source: bigthink.com

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• I've always loved opera; it never occurred to me that I would write a proper libretto. One of my closest friends is a composer, Paul Moravec, and a few years ago, Paul and I were at lunch, and I said to him, "you really have to write an opera." So, he says very casually to me, "I'll do it if you write the libretto." Well, little did I know that the within a couple of years we would end up getting a commission from the Santa Fe Opera to write an opera together, "The Letter," which turned out to be the most successful commissioned opera in the history of the Santa Fe Opera.

  Terry Teachout

  Couple, Writing, Successful

  Source: bigthink.com

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• For instance, members of the elite will never allow their children to become musicians normally, because it's - not embarrassing - but it's not done. There's a very famous composer from the '70s from a well-known family that disowned him, and he's a man, so there's this historical precedence with their relationships with musicians - not so much music as it's this abstract thing - but externally with artists.

  Ayshay

  Children, Artist, Men

  Source: www.acclaimmag.com

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• When we look at the arts and letters in America, especially if we look at poetry, and poetry set to music, this dialogue, we have this very powerful beautiful, eclectic, diary, or narration of being in America, being American, participating in America, becoming more of America and also as an American, the American creative spirit, which is quite interesting. Our composers and poets have spent more time writing and thinking and speaking out of what it means to be a composer or poet as well as to be an American, or a composer or poet In America; both relationships.

  Thomas Hampson

  Beautiful, Art, Powerful

  Source: bigthink.com

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• If you're reading a comic strip, you can read it at any speed you want. But with film and music, the audience has to take it the way the composer gives it.

  John Kricfalusi

  Reading, Giving, Film

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• One can't judge Wagner's opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don't intend to hear it a second time.

  Gioachino Rossini

  Time, Judging, Opera

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• If I weren't a director, I would want to be a film composer.

  Steven Spielberg

  Directors, Want, Film

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

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• You never know what you're going to share. I can play, I know what is written - the marks, the things the composer tells me to do - and I do it, but it will still sound different each day.

  Igor Levit

  Play, Sound, Different

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.

  Leonard Bernstein

  Writing, Tunes, Tone

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• I don't understand why we have to experiment with film. I think everything should be done on paper. A musician has to do it, a composer. He puts a lot of dots down and beautiful music comes out. And I think that students should be taught to visualize. That's the one thing missing in all this. The one thing that the student has got to do is to learn that there is a rectangle up there - a white rectangle in a theater - and it has to be filled.

  Alfred Hitchcock

  Beautiful, Thinking, White

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

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