Top 1200 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Composers - Page 3

The basic success of the conga came from ...that basic principle of African music and dance: everybody participates. The conga eradicated the distinction between performer and audience, broke down the wall of the proscenium.

I really think of my motives, my melodies, my harmonies, as being these things that are very much alive. They have these little lives of their own that are stretched and pulled, and I do conceive of my music in a very narrative way.

Pay no attention to what the critics say; no statue has ever been erected to a critic.

I found so much fun in the light shows and the multimedia shows of the hippies. That was when I was a student in the 1960s, and I was in New York, so I learned how to deal with writing, recording sound of other people, performance art - because that was a new territory, and I liked everything that was new and provocative. That interested me more than becoming anything specific.

It's always the same: mediocrities are over-valued and great men are rejected.

One can't judge Wagner's opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don't intend to hear it a second time.

I don't care how inventive you are; once you introduce strings into the ensemble for a horror film, you're entering into a world where a tradition has been thoroughly established. So it's repeated use over the years is like, 'Oh God, another film with strings, another spooky movie with strings.'

Knowing when to leave may be the smartest thing anyone can learn.

I've always regarded nature as the clothing of God.

If you're not living your truth, you're living a lie.

The French Revolution is the ultimate modernist statement. Destroy everything. Don't build on the past. There is no past.

Film music has a great history of composers and performers.

You know, nobody eats in England. Three or four pints of English beer a night fills you. I can't say I'm very impressed with the food in America. it's all sort of bland. Like turkey sandwiches.

You pile up enough tomorrows and you'll be left with nothing but a bunch of empty yesterdays. I don't know about you, but I'd like to make today worth remembering.

I write to find out about how the world sings.

Tension, especially with regard to horror, is a very difficult thing to sustain in the big sense.

It's the balance between wanting the power of electronics and having something real happening - if you want people to engage in what you're doing, I think that's important. I want to have fun with people, but that's hard to do with a laptop.

I think I came across Cecil Taylor a bit later, in 65 or 66. That really impressed me - Cecil Taylor is an amazing character... Both his music and the way he approaches the instrument are astonishing.

I tend to write it and then let go emotionally.

There's no way I can compete with someone who can write rap or rock and roll. Nor do I wish to. But I've always kept up to date with music changes. I worked very hard not to type myself.

There are still so many beautiful things to be said in C major.

I was composing before I realised I was a composer. It came more or less naturally. There were a couple of old ladies lived next door to me, and I frequented their house more than I did my own, because it had all those marvellous things in that that old ladies do have. And they had a piano, and I used to play around with that; they showed me how to read music and I used to play to them.

The family of God is the choir, and God is their audience.

I discovered that the most interesting music of all was made by simply lining the loops in unison, and letting them slowly shift out of phase with other.

When I was 15, I did not know nothing about what concerned the world of music.

I think that what's been holding composers back a great deal is that they feel they must have a new style every year. This, in my case, would be hopeless. In fact, it is said that I have no style at all, but that doesn't matter. I just go on doing, as they say, my thing. I believe this takes a certain courage.

Ragtime was my lullaby.

When I was four years old, my mother owned some tenements in the Bronx.

Ever up and onward.

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature and everlasting beauty of monotony.

A kiss on the hand may be quite continental, But Diamonds are a girl's best friend.

I try to talk as little as possible, unless I see something that I might disagree with.

Hip-hop has always been chronologically misunderstood. Too many times, people are hearing the story from the second floor. Nobody's heard the story from the basement. If hip-hop was a cake, all I can tell you is the eggs, the flour, the sugar, the vanilla - the ingredient years.

The music takes on all different jobs and hopefully is part of telling the story. Each song has to be a story unto itself. It's a very different set of muscles.

The music we made then was so amateurish, compared to the rest of mainstream pop or rock and roll. But what differentiated us from what everybody else was doing in the business was the fact that you could tell that these people came from different reference areas.

But that's fine, because I like to have control of the ambience.

There is no doubt that the first requirement for a composer is to be dead.

Fear is a problem with film music and films; people want to be conventional, and there's more commercialism today. If you are not daring in your art, you're bankrupt.

The older I get, the better I was.

Real randomness requires an infinite amount of information.

What is Music? How do you define it? Music is a calm moonlit night, the rustle of leaves in Summer. Music is the far off peal of bells at dusk! Music comes straight from the heart and talks only to the heart: it is Love! Music is the Sister of Poetry and her Mother is sorrow!

I am proud to be able to claim that, from the age of nineteen, I've managed to earna living entirely as a composer.

There's a very basic human, non-verbal aspect to our need to make music and use it as part of our human expression. It doesn't have to do with body movements, it doesn't have to do with articulation of a language, but with something spiritual.

The enormity of the universe revealed by science cannot readily be grasped by the human brain, but the music of The Planets enables the mind to acquire some comprehension of the vastness of space where rational understanding fails.

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.

In many ways, a song-writing partnership is like a marriage. Apart from just liking each other, a lyricist and a composer should be able to spend long periods of time together - around the clock if need be - without getting on each other's nerves. Their goals, outlooks, and basic philosophies should be similar.

Here is how I work: when I think that a film needs to have a principal theme, I search for a melody.

I like the variety. But basically my choice of films is a small intimate film. Quiet film, no action, just people in relationships. That's what I like the most.

What a beautiful art, but what a wretched profession.

I do the protest stuff. I do country and western. I play both acoustic and electric guitar in a lot of different styles, from loud, psychedelic stuff to quiet finger-picking.

I believe without exception that theory follows practice. Whenever there is a conflict between theory and practice, theory is wrong. As far as I'm concerned, we make theories for what people have done.

By concentrating on precision, one arrives at technique, but by concentrating on technique one does not arrive at precision.

Discipline means looking beyond the appearance, beyond that which is visible and acknowledging one Infinite Cause.

Within each of us is a hidden store of determination. Determination to keep us in the race when all seems lost.

I always tell people that my music should speak to them... and that they shouldn't feel obligated to say why or how. All reactions are valid; the important thing is to have the experience.

Each culture might lend its own dialect, but above all that is the language of music itself, and it doesn't care about politics or boundaries.

Music is a form of prayer.

Never trust anyone who wants what you've got. Friend or no, envy is an overwhelming emotion.

English music is white - it evades everything.

Suddenly a mist fell from my eyes and I knew the way I had to take.