Composer Quotes - Page 9

• Many composers today don't know what the human throat is.

  Elisabeth Schwarzkopf

  Today, Throat, Humans

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• Composers are not all good conductors.

  Anton Seidl

  Conductor

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• There are no black film composers doing the likes of Star Wars, doing the likes of E.T., doing the likes of Jurassic Park. There are none, nor will there ever be one. That ain't about to happen!

  J. J. Johnson

  Stars, War, Jurassic Park

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• The Russian composers, especially, tricked the symphony orchestra into the kind of dynamic, rhythmic thing

  Gerry Mulligan

  Symphony, Orchestra, Kind

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• A characteristic of older folksongs, in most cases, is that we don't know their composers or authors. Older folksongs were written often with no commercial purpose in mind. They were passed down by word of mouth, from generation to generation.

  Tom Glazer

  Mind, Generations, Purpose

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• When you have great songs that are going to live longer than the composers, everything you can do to bring those different elements and nuances out, serve the song

  Michael Bolton

  Song, Different, Elements

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• After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

  Aldous Huxley

  Motivational, Music, Wisdom

  Music at Night (1931) p. 17

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• A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.

  Leopold Stokowski

  Inspirational, Music, Art

  Leopold Stokowski's address to an audience at Carnegie Hall, as quoted in The New York Times, May 11, 1967.

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• I think that if I were required to spend the rest of my life on a desert island, and to listen to or play the music of any one composer during all that time, that composer would almost certainly be Bach.

  Glenn Gould

  Life, Music, Being Alone

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• Opinion in all parts of the world would agree that Rachmaninoff is the most complete of living masters of the instrument; his technique is comprehensive, and he is, of course, musical to his bone's marrow. Most important of all, he is a composer, and for this reason he is able to approach a work as none of his pianist contemporaries can approach one - that is, from the inside, as an organic and felt creative process.

  Sergei Rachmaninoff

  Creative, Musical, Important

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• I could create music that sounded as strange as any electronic music, because you see, my opinion about electronic music is that the real composer is the guy who invented the instrument. Pressing buttons is not composing. Composing is about creating something.

  Glenn Branca

  Real, Creating, Guy

  Source: pitchfork.com

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• What do you think happens to a composer who is sincere and loves to write and has to wait thirty years to have someone play a piece of his music?

  Charles Mingus

  Writing, Thinking, Expression

  "Setting the Tempo: Fifty Years of Great Jazz Liner Notes". Book by Tom Piazza, 1996.

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• To spend any time with someone who is among the top five film composers of the last 50 years is pure gold dust. I mean, not necessarily stylistically, because everyone is different in what their music sounds like, but the approach and how to look at a film, how to think about a film, how to decide what you want to do, how to think about characters, how to think about art, how to think about narrative, how to liaise with producers, how to liaise with directors.

  Henry Jackman

  Art, Character, Mean

  Source: collider.com

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• Who can forget the music of the French composer Germaine Tailleferre? These are just a few composers whose aesthetic ideals we all share, and there are many more women creators writing stunning and exciting music, and I wish I had space to list them all!

  Barbara Harbach

  Writing, Wish, Forget

  Source: www.barbaraharbach.com

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• In any case, once you're dealing on a nonverbal level, ambiguity is unavoidable. But it's the ambiguity of all art, of a fine piece of music or a painting - you don't need written instructions by the composer or painter accompanying such works to 'explain' them. “Explaining” them contributes nothing but a superficial 'cultural' value which has no value except for critics and teachers who have to earn a living.

  Stanley Kubrick

  Teacher, Art, Needs

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• The composer makes plans, music laughs.

  Morton Feldman

  Laughing, Plans

  Morton Feldman (2000). “Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman”

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• A composer's job involves the decoration of fragments of time.

  Frank Zappa

  Jobs, Fragments, Decoration

  Frank Zappa, Peter Occhiogrosso (1990). “Real Frank Zappa Book”, p.193, Simon and Schuster

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• If you're the sort of person that likes a job where once you know what you're doing you can keep doing what you're doing, don't ever become a film composer.

  Henry Jackman

  Jobs, Doing You, Likes

  Source: collider.com

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• When you have a single composer writing his work, it shouldn't be doled out in singles based on the length of a piece.

  Gail Zappa

  Writing, Pieces, Singles

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I don't work with an outline, except a vague one in my head, a general idea of character, place, arc... I'm like a composer with a symphony in their head: I can hear the music, I just have to figure out how to put it down on paper. But I don't always know where my stories are going when I begin.

  Said Sayrafiezadeh

  Character, Ideas, Symphony

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I think there's just been this "thing" that's developed, this way that we have of talking about our music that alienates people. And I fall into that too! I learned that in graduate school. You just talk about your music in a specific way, and that separates people from you. But some composers like that. Schoenberg liked that. He wanted to feel that he was making music for an elite few. That's fine for him, but I want to set myself free from that sort of attitude.

  Missy Mazzoli

  Attitude, Fall, School

  Source: therumpus.net

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• As a young composer I had a particular fondness for Liszt's Beethoven Symphony arrangements for the piano, and to this day I enjoy playing non-piano music at the piano.

  Michael Hersch

  Symphony, Piano, Young

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• Gorecki, you know, there's a kind of personal thing there for me. I had, you know, kind of become obsessed with that sort of Soviet Bloc period. And actually, a lot of composers in the Soviet Bloc - Gorecki's not the only one - are writing for the harpsichord as a sort of reaction against enforced Soviet realism, expressionism, sort of enforced modernism.

  Mahan Esfahani

  Writing, Kind, Obsessed

  "How To Annoy Your Dad: Play The Harpsichord". "All Things Considered" with Robert Siegel, www.npr.org. December 29, 2015.

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• Frank [Zappa] said he probably would have been a major criminal, given his brain power and his attention to detail, had he not been a composer. But being a composer is not something you can't help.

  Gail Zappa

  Brain, Criminals, Details

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The problem with composers is that they are the most unrequired job in America.

  Gail Zappa

  Jobs, America, Problem

  Source: therumpus.net

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