Composer Quotes - Page 5

• Music is a labyrinth with no beginning and no end,
  full of new paths to discover,
  where mystery remains eternal

  Pierre Boulez

  Music, Discovery, Labyrinth

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• There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.

  John Cage

  Life, Music, Time

  John Cage (2010). “Silence: Lectures and Writings”, p.22, Wesleyan University Press

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• Music is the space between the notes.

  Claude Debussy

  Music, Art, Weekend

  "Turning Numbers into Knowledge: Mastering the Art of Problem Solving". Book by Jonathan G. Koomey (p. 96), 2001.

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• I shall always respect the composer. If I embellish, it is his idea I am embellishing.

  Kate Smith

  Respect, Ideas, Ifs

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• The Western musical canon came about not merely by accumulation, but by opposition and subversion, both to the ruling powers on whom composers depended for their livelihoods and to other musics.

  Brian Ferneyhough

  Musical, Accumulation, Ruling

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• Composers are always going back to the past.

  Anne Dudley

  Past

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• Most of the important composers in our country are clustered in the Northeast.

  Carlisle Floyd

  Country, Important, Our Country

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• It's amazing how fast generations lose sight of other generations. One of the first things the young composers who come to work with me say is that they want to write music people will like, instead of gaining their credentials by being rejected by the audience.

  Carlisle Floyd

  Writing, Sight, People

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• Why should the composer be more guilty than the poet who warms to fantasy by a strange flame, making an idea that inspires him the subject of his own very different treatment?

  Franz Schubert

  Flames, Ideas, Inspire

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• When I began, the guitar was en-closed in a vicious circle. There were no composers writing for the guitar, be-cause there were no virtuoso guitarists.

  Andres Segovia

  Writing, Guitar, Circles

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• I don't use composers. I research music the way I research the photographs or the facts in my scripts.

  Ken Burns

  Use, Research, Way

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• In Hollywood, the rainbow hits the ground for composers.

  Hoagy Carmichael

  Rainbow, Hollywood

  Hoagy Carmichael (1946). “The stardust road”

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• The difference between the student and the born composer is he really hears the thing, and they have to stage it and manipulate it by technical equipment.

  Leo Ornstein

  Differences, Manipulation, Students

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• Composers today get a TV script on Friday and have to record on Tuesday. It's just dreadful to impose on gifted talent and expect decent music under these conditions.

  Alex North

  Friday, Tuesday, Records

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• John Barry was the first film composer I was aware of. As a teenager I owned several of his Bond soundtracks.

  Carter Burwell

  Teenager, Firsts, Film

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• I loved Hendrix. I mean, really, really loved him. As if he were one of the great classical composers. And he was. That's how I saw him.

  Warren Zevon

  Mean, Saws, Hendrix

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• 

  When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.

  Jimi Hendrix

  Love, Inspirational, Life

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  This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.

  Leonard Bernstein

  Music, Peace, Ubuntu

  Leonard Bernstein (1982). “Findings”, Anchor

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• When I speak of the gifted listener, I am thinking of the nonmusician primarily, of the listener who intends to retain his amateur status. It is the thought of just such a listener that excites the composer in me.

  Aaron Copland

  Music, Thinking, Listening

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• Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.

  Jean Genet

  Music, Song, Memories

  Jean Genet (2003). “Prisoner of Love”, New York Review of Books

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• Rossini would have been a great composer if his teacher had spanked him enough on his backside.

  Ludwig van Beethoven

  Teacher, Teaching, Musical

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• More significant than the fact that poets write abstrusely, painters paint abstractly, and composers compose unintelligible music is that people should admire what they cannot understand; indeed, admire that which has no meaning or principle.

  Eric Hoffer

  Pain, Writing, People

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• The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the listener anticipates on the basis of a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining. If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void. When the composer withholds less, the opposite occurs: he forces us to perform gymnastic exercises more skillful than our own.

  Claude Levi-Strauss

  Music, Spring, Fall

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• I have always found it difficult to study. I have learnt almost entirely what I have learnt by trying it out on the dog.

  Ralph Vaughan Williams

  Dog, Trying, Study

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• A man with a talent does what is expected of him, makes his way, constructs, is an engineer, a composer, a builder of bridges. It's the natural order of things that he construct objects outside himself and his family. The woman who does so is aberrant. We have to expiate for this cursed talent someone handed out to us, by mistake, in the black mystery of genetics.

  May Sarton

  Mistake, Men, Order

  May Sarton (2014). “Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing: A Novel”, p.96, Open Road Media

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