Top 1200 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Composers - Page 2

If you listen to nature, all the sounds are done in a confident way. I'm trying to do that.

The songs of Raghavan Master are timeless. There are a lot of things that a student of music has to learn from them. He expressed his thoughts not through words, but music.

You can't possibly predict what will last or not. But once you attempt to write for the ages, you're doomed.

Where the heart does not enter; there can be no music.

Well, rather than to give you my impression on Los Angeles, per se, my older sister's husband is and American, therefore I have a pretty good idea of the, perhaps the characteristics of Americans in general.

True excellence is a product of synergy.

I'm not an atheist, but I'm not a Christian, either.

I didn't want my music to be seen as examples of an electronic culture; I just wanted them to be thought of as pieces of music.

There have been studies that clearly state that children who are exposed to arts education at a young age will in fact do markedly better in their SAT tests.

But I'm an adventurer. I like invention, I like discovery.

I don't have ideas so much as there are things which constantly evolve... there are various threads or layers, if you like, which change.

It doesn't necessarily mean at all that the composer plays his own works best.

Without craftsmanship, inspiration is a mere reed shaken in the wind.

The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.

The future will be the child of the past and the present, even if a rebellious child.

The human voice is the first and most natural musical instrument, also the most emotional.

I don't make a particular distinction between 'high art' and 'low art.' Music is there for everybody. It's a river we can all put our cups into and drink it and be sustained by it.

I currently spend a lot of time thinking about orchestration and every detail of a piece.

We had common interests in the beauty of the French language. We both had a tremendous love of jazz. We shared dreams of getting married and having a family, living in the country, leading an idyllic life.

You reach a certain point in your life where they things you do and say do make a difference.

It's like learning a language; you can't speak a language fluently until you find out who you are in that language, and that has as much to do with your body as it does with vocabulary and grammar.

Aaron Copland was a man that had a very specific point of view about what music should be which was that, he felt that new music should have the composer should show a personality in his music.

But in the next world I shan't be doing music, with all the striving and disappointments. I shall be being it.

Well, because music is my life and music is not work for me.

I never was very capable of expressing my feelings or emotions in words. I don't know whether this is the cause why I did it in music and also why I did it in painting. Or vice versa: That I had this way as an outlet. I could renounce expressing something in words.

Life holds so many simple blessings, each day bringing its own individual wonder.

I believe that music should be grown on trees, to be plucked like a fruit without the extravagance of harvest.

Let your mind alone, and see what happens.

Science and mythology were the topics which fascinated me since my early childhood.

The opposite of war is not peace, it's creation.

When I talk of primordial innocence, I hear it in Sufi music with the nay flute. I see it in Coptic icons, in most traditional art, particularly art of the American Indian. I find the texts extraordinarily beautiful and very childlike and very simple. I've been particularly interested in American Indian texts.

Music is organized sound.

Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow.

Music can also be a sensual pleasure, like eating food or sex. But its highest vibration for me is that point of taking us to a real understanding of something in our nature which we can very rarely get at. It is a spiritual state of oneness.

Sound is the vocabulary of nature.

Music is a performance and needs the audience.

There was no one near to confuse me, so I was forced to become original.

The idea for Anthem the play began over twenty years ago. I was assisting in the production of another Ayn Rand work, Ideal. I moved to New York and began working on producing the play with my partners. And as a way to raise money to cover some venture debt, we decided to stage Anthem for a limited run at the Lex Theatre in Hollywood.

If you don't get feedback from your performers and your audience, you're going to be working in a vacuum.

My first ever job of doing additional writing for Hans was 'Batman Begins', so that's going back I don't know, are we at 13 years now? I was his assistant for maybe ten years, a long journey.

We need to open up the future. We also need to keep everything valuable from the past.

The essence of the beautiful is unity in variety.

When everyone is somebody, then no one's anybody.

Yehudi Wyner has reinvented for himself a Romanticism that somehow manages to seem like a step forward rather than a step back.

Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.

When I was young, I was told: 'You'll see, when you're fifty.' I am fifty and I haven't seen a thing.

The score is doing a lot of work. It's like Wagner. It's like a yak carrying people.

I think jazz is a beautiful, democratic music. It encourages musicians with very strong, and many times, very different points of view to work together as a team while, at the same time, giving them the space to express their individuality. It's a very important art form and can be used as a model for different cultures to work together.

I really feel instrumental music can speak - can contain tremendous amounts of information - but it's speaking to your subconscious.

I feel I must fight for [my music], because I want women to turn their minds to big and difficult jobs; not just to go on hugging the shore, afraid to put out to sea.

Let us take our children seriously! Everything else follows from this... only the best is good enough for a child.

I first had the thought about making a musical of 'Edwin Drood' as far back as 1971.

The human voice is the most beautiful instrument of all, but it is the most difficult to play.

'Retirement' is a dirty word. Luckily, I can carry on working until I drop, provided I retain my mental abilities.

You don't get music in your daily life, do you? Even in a movie, it's unnatural to have music. I always feel it's unnatural. But I want to make it not unnatural, to construct reality in another sense.

You may have the universe if I may have Italy.

Genius is an overused word. The world has known only about a half dozen geniuses. I got only fairly near.

I ended up writing songs by taking stock of all the different events in my life, but all those songs were bad.

That inner voice has both gentleness and clarity. So to get to authenticity, you really keep going down to the bone, to the honesty, and the inevitability of something.

The only love affair I have ever had was with music.