Top 1200 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Composers - Page 16

Essentially my contribution was to introduce repetition into Western music as the main ingredient without any melody over it, without anything just repeated patterns, musical patterns.

As a composer you want to tell musicians two completely contradictory things. You want to say, "Play exactly what I wrote, but bring your own thing to it." In a lot of ways they feel like opposites, but in a sense, my job is to cajole or encourage decisions that I approve of.

I had to get out of America to get a professional life going where I could actually make a living.

I started playing piano with a little band in high school. I was terrible. I thought I had absolutely no talent. I couldn't keep time. I only got into McGill, which was a lousy music school, because they were taking American music students.

Music and text have several commonalities, and one is meter and rhythm. Both spoken word and music have certain regularities, and they can be sub-divided rhythmically.

Music is only understood when one goes away singing it and only loved when one falls asleep with it in one's head, and finds it still there on waking up the next morning.

My father had left behind an old piano. My sister was already going to school, my mother was out working, and I stayed at home alone with my adorable grandmother who understood nothing I said. It was so boring that I stayed at the piano all day long, and that saved my life.

I compose music because I must give expression to my feelings, just as I talk because I must give utterance to my thoughts.

In summer, I like to sit and compose on the porch, where I can see people come and go.

My faith is the grand drama of my life. I'm a believer, so I sing words of God to those who have no faith. I give bird songs to those who dwell in cities and have never heard them, make rhythms for those who know only military marches or jazz, and paint colors for those who see none.

I moved to L.A. in 2007 from Sweden.

A Dad gives hope When life is low A Dad's a place Where you can go A Dad is honest A Dad is true A Dad is precious My DAD is You Happy Birthday to YOU Happy Birthday to YOU Happy Birthday , Happy Birthday Happy Birthday to YOU

One experiments and has to choose always the best results.

Time's fatal wings do ever forward fly; to every day we live, a day we die.

I don't care how much people understand what it is that I'm doing, except if they're players in my ensemble or other ensembles. I just want people to be moved by the music. If you're not moved by the music, then everything else falls away. You're not interested in the text, you're not interested in how it was done, and you're not interested in interviewing the composer and all the rest of it.

No, it's a Bb. It looks wrong and it sounds wrong, but it's right.

That is why the analogy of stealing does not work. With a thief, we want to know how much money he stole, and from whom. With the artist it is not how much he took and from whom, but what he did with it.

England is so defined, the class system, your education. I think what was unique about the Canterbury scene.

The earth forms the body of an instrument, across which strings are stretched and are tuned by a divine hand. We must try once again to find the secret of that tuning.

So I write melodies - thirty, forty, fifty - then I cast them off until I have just two or three. If only one is needed, I go see the director and ask him to decide.

The work of Liszt I most admire is the music he wrote toward the end of his life. This is often music of tremendous inventiveness. The music seems to be seeking something. It tends to be restless, unpredictable, often very sad.

If we understood the world, we would realize that there is a logic of harmony underlying its manifold apparent dissonances.

Occasionally I hear a band that blows me away. For instance, there's a musician in Oakland named Weasel Walter who has a band called the Flying Luttenbachers. Go see the Flying Luttenbachers when they're in your town. He's one of the greatest rock composers who ever lived, and he's struggling and living like a poverty-stricken hermit.

I think we always move from imitation to assimilation to innovation, but I can't name you 20 people outside those we've already recognized who ever got to point three: innovation.

Truly there would be reason to go mad were it not for music.

I like the idea of imagining a sound and feeling a sound and then having it come out through your body, through an instrument. That's an important way to make music.

My work on hyper instruments started with simple instruments, like the piano.

There is nothing is more musical than a sunset. He who feels what he sees will find no more beautiful example of development in all that book which, alas, musicians read but too little - the book of Nature.

There's some familiarity in Celtic music, even if you've never heard that piece of music before.

I would wake up in Moscow or somewhere else, my heart beating fast, feeling bitter and helpless.

For me the best kind of film music is liturgical music. Liturgical music is essentially a million scores for the same film.

When I decided to go to a country that subsidized music, I went to the Soviet Union for two years.

If you're a film composer, you have the music tell the story of the character.

You just plant a few seeds, cultivate the shoots, and watch your career grow and branch out. It takes time and dedication. There are no overnight success stories in the music business!

The message of some churches today seems to be, "Only sing if it appeals to your sense of style, or your demographic." Yet when we look at heaven, we see that every tribe and every nation will sing together.

By the visual pattern, but mostly I'm guided entirely by my ear, what I hear.

I think about that 'empty' space a lot. That emptiness is what allows for something to actually evolve in a natural way. I've had to learn that over the years - because one of the traps of being an artist is to always want to be creating, always wanting to produce.

Napolean is dead - but Beethoven lives.

Nature has different times.

I was using tape loops for dancers and dance production. I had very funky primitive equipment, in fact technology wasn't very good no matter how much money you had.

Music, being identical with heaven, isn't a thing of momentary thrills, or even hourly ones. It's a condition of eternity.

A chap can't pick the way he'll die, or we'd all do better at it.

When I was a teenager in a band playing, everything was great. I still don't feel any different. I still wake up with the same love and passion as when I did this with the band. Because my life in music has let me live the kind of life that I've loved, and I've been able to share it with others and take care of the people I love.

Just because something 'is' doesn't mean that it should be.

As you may know my use of Celtic music is extremely simple and short. However there is something about it that will remain in your mind for a long, long time.

Yes, I get a report from BMI about the frequency of performances, and it is very surprising. They played one of my most advanced pieces, and one of my most unusual ones on the radio.

Romance is mush, stifling those who strive.

Nice is different than good.

Speaking of River City in The Music Man & his home town, Mason City, Iowa: I didn't have to make up anything. I simply remembered Mason City as closely as I could.

I think everything should happen at halfway to dawn. That's when all the heads of government should meet. I think everybody would fall in love.

My mother's background was Scottish. She came from an old family, some of whom lived in upper New York State and some of whom had come over from Scotland.

Probably the best way to describe my writing style is to refer you to "purple prose", which was a tag given to the early mass market magazine writers earning a half cent a word for their fiction. They had to use every adjective, verb and adverb in the English language to add word count to stories in order to feed and support families.

I find above all that the expression, atonal music, is most unfortunate — it is on a par with calling flying the art of not falling, or swimming the art of not drowning.

Melodies and ideas are always on my mind and always coming to me. I'm very thankful for that because if I didn't have whatever that is, that craziness, that openness, maybe, I don't think I'd be able to do what I really love to do, which is write great melodies and at least try to write great melodies.

It seems to me opera is just as relevant as an expressive art as anything else.

I probably belong to a type of composer of songs who keeps thinking about melody... I am old fashioned.

I have never doubted the importance of melody. I like melody very much, and I consider it the most important element in music, and I labour many years on the improvement of its quality in my compositions.

Victor Young had been hired to write the score for the dances of The Ten Commandments but he became very ill. You were then hired to write the score. But at the same time you'd written The Man with the Golden Arm score.

I think that the basic philosophy was very good. It was just be nice to each other, and don't step on other people's toes and infringe on their freedom.

I've had little success in intellectual circles. I'm not talked about in the 'New York Review of Books,' and I was never part of the Stravinsky 'inner circle.'