Composing Quotes

• Composing a piece of music is very feminine. It is sensitive, emotional, contemplative. By comparison, doing housework is positively masculine.

  Barbara Kolb

  Emotional, Pieces, Sensitive

  60 Copy quote

• I am composing like a god, as if it simply had to be done as it has been done.

  Franz Schubert

  Done, Has Beens, Ifs

  45 Copy quote

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

  Aldous Huxley

  Motivational, Music, Wisdom

  Music at Night (1931) p. 17

  88 Copy quote

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• Works of art make rules but rules do not make works of art.

  Claude Debussy

  Art, Musician, Classical Music

  "Companion to Contemporary Musical Thought". Book by John Paynter, 1992.

  108 Copy quote

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• If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.

  Gustav Mahler

  Funny, Music, Expression

  Letter to Max Marschalk, March 26, 1896.

  98 Copy quote

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• Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.

  Ludwig van Beethoven

  Music, Wisdom, Philosophy

  Ludwig van Beethoven, Friedrich Kerst, Henry Edward Krehbiel (1964). “Beethoven, the Man and the Artist, as Revealed in His Own Words”, p.13, Courier Corporation

  71 Copy quote

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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 wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?

  Rebecca West

  People, Wonder, Novel

  16 Copy quote

• I was...attacked for being a pasticheur, chided for composing "simple" music, blamed for deserting "modernism," accused of renouncing my "true Russian heritage." People who had never heard of, or cared about, the originals cried "sacrilege": "The classics are ours. Leave the classics alone." To them all my answer was and is the same: You "respect," but I love.

  Igor Stravinsky

  Simple, Artist, People

  "Expositions and Developments". Book by Igor Stravinsky, Robert Craft, pp. 113-114, 1959.

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• I'd always loved poetry and I'd always loved writing music and composing music, but I hadn't thought of putting the two together until around that time.

  Bruce Cockburn

  Writing, Two, Together

  16 Copy quote

• My mother also had us take piano lessons, and this had a similar effect. I hated those lessons, but I now play regularly for pleasure and have even tried my hand at composing.

  Robert B. Laughlin

  Mother, Hands, Play

  16 Copy quote

• When I am seriously composing, sometimes a phrase will come into my head, a catch phrase. When I was writing pop songs for a few years, as a career, separate from my folksinging career, I used to write songs for pop singers.

  Tom Glazer

  Song, Writing, Years

  16 Copy quote

• My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan.

  Alex North

  Film, Best Film

  16 Copy quote

• I was very committed to the process of composing, working at poems, putting things together and taking them apart like some kind of experimental filmmaker.

  David Antin

  Together, Kind, Process

  16 Copy quote

• In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give your style.

  Sydney Smith

  Running, Writing, Ideas

  Sydney Smith, lady Saba (Smith) Holland Holland (1855). “A Memoir of the Reverend Sydney Smith”, p.431

  16 Copy quote

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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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• The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

  T. S. Eliot

  Funny, Work, Reading

  20 Copy quote

• Since age seven, I've been composing and have never stopped composing, yet, the creative process is as elusive to me as it has ever been.

  Lukas Foss

  Creative, Age, Seven

  18 Copy quote

• There is nothing greater than the joy of composing something oneself and then listening to it.

  Clara Schumann

  Joy, Listening, Oneself

  26 Copy quote

• I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.

  Gordon Getty

  Paris, Piano, Bookstores

  18 Copy quote

• There are people who must spend huge amounts of time composing these online diatribes against me, all about how disgusting and terrible I am and how no one should ever read my books, and it's not enough for them to hate me, they can't stand the fact that ANYONE likes me!

  Poppy Z. Brite

  Hate, Book, People

  16 Copy quote

• The songs of Bizet are by a French peer of Rossini. When Rossini stopped composing, he was living in Paris. He also wrote some beautiful songs in French.

  Cecilia Bartoli

  Beautiful, Song, Paris

  53 Copy quote

• I began composing works which were imitative of the music I was being told about. I was also very interested in translating the music into visual terms.

  Henry Flynt

  Artist, Term, Translate

  16 Copy quote

• However, I began composing as soon as I started taking piano lessons.

  Gyorgy Ligeti

  Piano, Lessons, Piano Lesson

  16 Copy quote

• There will have to be times when I'm not conducting because I'm composing. I haven't solved that problem, and perhaps I never will.

  Esa-Pekka Salonen

  Problem, Conducting, Havens

  16 Copy quote