Composition Quotes - Page 19

• If we make mistakes in our first compositions and do not know them, we may not amend them.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Mistake, May, Firsts

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• The oldest principle of composition: repeat everything.

  Richard Powers

  Principles, Repeats

  Richard Powers (2014). “Orfeo”, p.65, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• Boswell, when he speaks of his Life of Johnson, calls it my magnum opus, but it may more properly be called his opera, for it is truly a composition founded on a true story, in which there is a hero with a number of subordinate characters, and an alternate succession of recitative and airs of various tone and effect, all however in delightful animation.

  James Boswell

  Hero, Character, Air

  James Boswell, Marlies K. Danziger (1989). “Boswell, the great biographer, 1789-1795”, McGraw-Hill Companies

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• High-class kitsch may well be "perfect" in its form and and composition: the academic painters were often masters of their craft. Thus, the accusation that a work of kitsch is based not on lack of for or aesthetic merit but on the presence of a particularly provocative emotional content. (The best art, by contrast, eschews emotional content altogether.)

  Robert C. Solomon

  Art, Emotional, Class

  Robert C. Solomon (1970). “Entertaining Ideas: Popular Philosophical Essays, 1970-1990”

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• When I was small child, all that belonged to conservative society was fashionable, and no republicans were welcome in the smartersalons. People living in such a milieu could imagine that the impossibility of ever inviting an "opportunist", much less a "radical", was a thing that would last forever, like gas lamps and horse-drawn omnibuses. But similar to kaleidoscopes turning from time to time, society successively places in various ways elements which were thought to be immutable and creates a new composition.

  Marcel Proust

  Fashion, Horse, Children

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• The composition is already there, you just need to crop it

  Jay Maisel

  Needs, Crops

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• A journal is a repository for all those fragmentary ideas and odd scraps of information that might otherwise be lost and which some day might lead to more "harmonious compositions."

  Henry David Thoreau

  Ideas, Might, Information

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• A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game. A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible. Its laws and rules are not, however, harbored in the inaccessibility of a secret; it is simply that they can never be booked, in the present, into anything that could rigorously be called a perception.

  Jacques Derrida

  Law, Games, Forever

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• That's what Samuel Johnson said: "Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think particularly fine, strike it out."

  Nick Laird

  Thinking, Over You

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• If I came out a photographer it's because I knew about painting, composition, and the handling of light.

  Lola Alvarez Bravo

  Light, Photographer, Painting

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• The instrumental pieces are compositions, certainly, although that's not the language that I instinctively use. They're not scored, and arrangements are often arrived at collaboratively. I always choose to play with people whose input I desire.

  David Grubbs

  Play, People, Desire

  Interview with Nick Hallett, logger.believermag.com. May 16, 2013.

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• It appears to me that the subject of music, from Machaut to Boulez, has always been its construction. Melodies of 12-tone rows just don't happen. They must be constructed....To demonstrate any formal idea in music, whether structure or stricture, is a matter of construction, in which the methodology is the controlling metaphor of the composition...Only by 'unfixing' the elements traditionally used to construct a piece of music could the sounds exist in themselves--not as symbols, or memories which were memories of other music to begin with.

  Morton Feldman

  Music, Memories, Ideas

  "Classic Essays on Twentieth-Century Music" by Richard Kostelanetz, Joseph Darby, 1996.

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• I'm pretty optimistic about the future of rock... it will be back to composition as in classical music or jazz.

  Jimmy Page

  Music, Optimistic, Rocks

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• By the grace of God and with His help, I shall one day be a Liszt in technique and a Mozart in composition

  Bedrich Smetana

  Grace, One Day, Technique

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• Another factor is that in terms of the original compositions, this is our strongest year yet. Everyone wrote a fantastic piece and everyone really had a greater sense of how to write for this band -- not only for this particular instrumentation, but for these particular players. Each year, the reality is getting closer to the ideal of a collective.

  Joshua Redman

  Writing, Player, Reality

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• Question the images. Take them by the hand and don't let the sweet distancing they offer you vanquish you; do away with the distance's comfort or the soft indifference you derive from concentrating on the quality of the framing, the use of light and shadows, the successful composition. Force these images to bring you to the Mexican Southeast, to history, to the struggle, to this taking sides, to choose a faction.

  Subcomandante Marcos

  Sweet, Distance, Struggle

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• What I try to impart to a musician is to really try to practice the instrument in a really sincere way. Learn as much about music as you possibly can. Learn composition. Study to try to create compositions of your own and put your own personal touch on your music.

  Roscoe Mitchell

  Practice, Trying, Musician

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• Beautiful forms and compositions are not made by chance, nor can they ever, in any material, be made at small expense.

  Josiah Wedgwood

  Beautiful, Chance, Form

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• Because of my compact and muscular body composition, my short hair, and my "Johawk," I have been mistaken for a boy on many occasions. Each time it happens, it feels like I have been punched in the gut. It is extremely discouraging.

  Joanna Lohman

  Boys, Hair, Body

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• I think this my last album - No Place For My Dream - truly is my best work. My fear now is, I don't know if I can do better than this in my lifetime, because technically, sound quality, composition, the melody is really high standard, it's very scary; the way it was recorded, the way I was focused. I think it is top of the music scene.

  Femi Kuti

  Dream, Thinking, Scary

  Source: www.premiumtimesng.com

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• Chess is one of the few arts where composition takes place simultaneously with performance

  Garry Kasparov

  Art, Chess, Performances

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• ...I think finding that room to make pictures that don't jump off the wall as, or detonate as dramatic, either in lighting or in form or in composition or in subject matter, but more ordinary, that's the challenge.

  Larry Sultan

  Wall, Thinking, Challenges

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• I am a fan of the compositions of The Beatles, but I don't care for their interpretation of them. But as compositions, I just think that some of them are brilliant and have become standards.

  Patricia Barber

  Thinking, Care, Brilliant

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• I've never really found it that important to focus too much on the fact that I'm a female. I feel like if you make a thing of it then it becomes a "thing." For me personally, gender has always been one of the last things on my mind and I would much rather let the music do the talking. It was definitely surprising at the start to see how many people often got shocked that I would do the entire part of the composition/production/mixdown process on my own, but I don't think women are pigeonholed as much these days.

  Maya Jane Coles

  Thinking, People, Focus

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• I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Attitude, Philosophy, Thinking

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