Composing Quotes - Page 6

• Composing is improvisation slowed down.

  Wayne Shorter

  Music, Jazz, Improvisation

  37 Copy quote

• There is the happiness which comes from creative effort. The joy of dreaming, creating, building, whether in painting a picture, writing an epic, singing a song, composing a symphony, devising new invention, creating a vast industry.

  Henry Miller

  Dream, Song, Writing

  12 Copy quote

• My mother was a classical pianist and my stepfather was an industrialist who was passionate about composing contemporary music.

  Carla Bruni

  Mother, Passionate, Stepfathers

  5 Copy quote

• When I lived in New York, there wasn't as much TV or film around. I got asked to do a couple of indie films, just based on me being from The Smashing Pumpkins and A Perfect Circle. I did a couple of indie movies from Japan and one from Canada, and I thought it was an exciting, fun thing to do. I had a great time doing it, it was just that, in New York, there really wasn't as much. My studio in New York closed, so I moved out to L.A. and just started looking into composing as another thing to do, as a musician. I like it a lot. It's fun and it's a different way of thinking about music.

  James Iha

  New York, Couple, Fun

  "James Iha on Scoring James Franco’s ‘Mother, May I Sleep with Danger?’". Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. June 17, 2016.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Composing is just another exciting thing. It's as exciting as being in a band. It's kind of like joining a new band for three months.

  James Iha

  Months, Three, Joining

  "James Iha on Scoring James Franco’s ‘Mother, May I Sleep with Danger?’". Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. June 17, 2016.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• There is a similarity between juggling and composing on the typewriter. The trick is, when you spill something, make it look like a part of the act.

  Tom Robbins

  Typewriters, Looks, Still Life With Woodpecker

  Tom Robbins (2003). “Still Life with Woodpecker”, p.10, Bantam

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• When composing a verse let there not be a hair's breath separating your mind from what you write; composition of a poem must be done in an instant, like a woodcutter felling a huge tree or a swordsman leaping at a dangerous enemy.

  Matsuo Basho

  Writing, Positivity, Hair

  57 Copy quote

• Miss Bennet, I am quite aware of your superior talent for cutting down the Lord's forsaken flock. I merely mean to spare your gown.' Thank you,' said Elizabeth, composing herself, 'but I should rather my gown be soiled than my honor.

  Seth Grahame-Smith

  Mean, Cutting, Missing

  Seth Grahame-Smith, Jane Austen, Roberto Parada (2009). “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance--now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem”, p.163, Chronicle Books

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Composing a concert is like composing a menu.... If you start with light pieces and play a 45-minute sonata after the interlude, it's like starting dinner with hors d'oeuvres and dessert and finishing with a Châteaubriand and vegetables.

  Arthur Rubinstein

  Light, Vegetables, Play

  10 Copy quote

• It's not instant composing; it's not following any kind of a formula. All you do is hear music in your head and reproduce it.

  Lennie Tristano

  Kind, Formulas, Instant

  6 Copy quote

• It smells terrible in here.' Well, what do you expect? The human body, when confined, produces certain odors which we tend to forget in this age of deodorants and other perversions. Actually, I find the atmosphere of this room rather comforting. Schiller needed the scent of apples rotting in his desk in order to write. I, too, have my needs. You may remember that Mark Twain preferred to lie supinely in bed while composing those rather dated and boring efforts which contemporary scholars try to prove meaningful. Veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate.

  John Kennedy Toole

  Meaningful, Lying, Writing

  John Kennedy Toole (2004). “A Confederacy of Dunces”, p.70, LSU Press

  27 Copy quote

  Show source

• I used to look at composing music as problem solving. But as I get older, it's not about problem solving anymore. There are no solutions, because there are no problems. You just turn the tap and it flows out.

  John Zorn

  Looks, Flow, Problem

  7 Copy quote

• I've found in composing that being simple and profound—having in-depthness in your music—is the most difficult thing to do. Anybody can write a whole lot of notes, which may or may not say something . . . But why make it complicated for the musicians to play? Why make it difficult for the listeners to hear?

  Horace Silver

  Writing, Simple, Play

  24 Copy quote

• Composing for concert performance is a somewhat lonely occupation, but composing a film score is highly collaborative.

  William P. Perry

  Lonely, Occupation, Film

  Source: www.empressbooks.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• In England, life is a long process of composing oneself.

  Shirley Hazzard

  Long, England, Life Is

  Shirley Hazzard (2004). “Cliffs of Fall: And Other Stories”, p.66, Macmillan

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• I was sixteen, I became a working guitar player gigging in LA, mostly in top 40 bands, then touring. I learned to take songs apart, down to their bones. Songwriters would hire me to produce their demos, which lead me to become a songwriter. The relationship and power music has to TV and film attracted me to composing [and] I learned to write for instruments other than guitar.

  Danny Jacob

  Song, Writing, Player

  Source: www.axs.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Art has become more than painting, sculpture or music: art is more than Van Gogh painting a landscape or Wagner composing an opera. The whole of reality itself has become the object of art.

  Paul Virilio

  Art, Reality, Sculpture

  Source: ctheory.net

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Every bit of theorizing I've ever done, including my interest in Berg, has come as a consequence of discoveries I made as a composer and interests that I developed as a composer. I never thought of my theory as being a kind of irrelevant activity to my composing.

  George Perle

  Discovery, Done, Kind

  "George Perle, a Composer and Theorist, Dies at 93" by Allan Kozinn, www.nytimes.com. January 24, 2009.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• The translator ... Peculiar outcast, ghost in the world of literature, recreating in another form something already created, creating and not creating, writing words that are his own and not his own, writing a work not original to him, composing with utmost pains and without recognition of his pains or the fact that the composition really is his own.

  Lydia Davis

  Pain, Writing, Creating

  7 Copy quote

• If one were asked to name one musician who came closest to composing without human flaw, I suppose general consensus would choose Johann Sebastian Bach.

  Aaron Copland

  Names, Musician, Flaws

  Aaron Copland (1959). “The pleasures of music”

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• I think it's important to be sincere. And I could be the most sincere just staying in [my] mother language actually. And that's the reason why I stay composing and writing in French.

  Stromae

  Mother, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.ebony.com

  36 Copy quote

  Show source

• It's not only that I want to get things right when I'm composing but that my imagination often gets lost, and then I have to wait until I come back to the path. I think there's an internal force that makes a piece logical from beginning to end; I like to tell stories in music that are unexpected but also logical.

  George Benjamin

  Thinking, Imagination, Waiting

  Source: www.sfgate.com

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Composing music is what makes me happy.

  L.Joe

  Make Me Happy, Music Is, Composing Music

  Source: www.allkpop.com

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• The London music world isn't a particularly cohesive place. And when I'm composing, I'm not very friendly. I need isolation.

  George Benjamin

  Friendly, Needs, World

  Source: www.sfgate.com

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• A revolution is not the overturning of a cart, a reshuffling in the cards of state. It is a process, a swelling, a new growth in the race. If it is real, not simply a trauma, it is another ring in the tree of history, layer upon layer of invisible tissue composing the evidence of a circle.

  Kate Millett

  Change, Real, Circles

  Kate Millett (2000). “Flying”, p.360, University of Illinois Press

  7 Copy quote

  Show source