Top 1200 Quotes & Sayings by Famous Composers - Page 4

What love is to man, music is to the arts and to mankind. Music is love itself - it is the purest, most ethereal language of passion, showing in a thousand ways all possible changes of color and feeling; and though true in only a single instance, it yet can be understood by thousands of men - who all feel differently.

Mozart is sweet sunshine.

Do you know that my very first experience as a composer was a 'Concerto for Accordion?'

You've got to win in your mind before you win in your life.

Learn all there is to learn, and then choose your own path.

The average English critic is a don manqué, hopelessly parochial when not exaggeratedly teutonophile, over whose desk must surely hang the motto (presumably in Gothic lettering) "Above all no enthusiasm".

I don't like to do things the same way every time. You always want to be evolving as a composer, and if your creative process is exactly the same each time, then how do you expect today's work to be any different from yesterday's?

Musical ideas sprang to my mind like a flight of butterflies, and all I had to do was to stretch out my hand to catch them

I am a composer first and foremost, and have always believed that being able to write memorable melodies is what sets musicians apart. My songs bring images to the listener's mind. The object is to transport my listeners to another place, some place sacred and spiritual that will make them glad they took the ride.

Music is the healing force of the universe.

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.

If listeners aren't carried away to Heaven, I'm failing.

Art is a kind of illness.

Competitions are for horses, not artists.

I always tried so hard to fit in, and then I figured out that I didn't want to fit.

Art is borne out of necessity. Music is a tool and men are doers. When a relationship is working, you don't need to write a song-you need to get toilet paper.

Still the noise in the mind: that is the first task - then everything else will follow in time.

If you work with so many classical instruments... I mean, it still has this power, and it's still connected to the idea of techno. But it has its own quality, its own sound. It's in between, even more than the record before. You need to give every instrument, sound, and element the space it needs.

The problem with our art form: it's so ephemeral, and catching performances can be so difficult... the important thing is what happens at the moment of performance, for the people who made the effort to be there: it lives with them.

There's always a melody running around in my mind and my brain; and I'm really thankful for it.

If people want insights, if they want to swim in the currents of their own time and share the experiences of their time, then it makes sense to engage with the artists of one's own time.

Writing tonal music now, you are not writing into the 19th Century.

I have increasingly become conversant with Pythagoras' and Goethe's idea of a primordial music, not perceptible to the sensuous ear, but sounding and soaring throughout the cosmos. Tracing it to such exalted origins, I begin to understand more deeply the essence of our art and its elemental power over the human soul. Man, being a creature of Nature and subject to the cosmic influences that inform all earthly beings, must needs have been under the sway of that music from his earliest days; his organism reverberated with its vibrations and received it's rhythmic impulses.

Miles Davis had been in retirement for five or six years and he was coming out of retirement and he was looking for young guys. Somebody gave him my name and he called me and said, "Can you show up at Columbia Studios in two hours?" I'm like, "Whoa, is this the real Miles Davis?" He's like, "Yeah." So I showed up and yeah, it was intimidating, but music is so important to me that the intimidation was all before the notes started.

Perhaps many of the perplexing problems of the new music could be put into a new light if we were to reintroduce the ancient idea of music being a reflection of nature.

The art of music above all the other arts is the expression of the soul of a nation.

Then, when the Depression came, all of this changed completely. Since that time, the entire public is of a very different sort and there was not so much support for contemporary music in a direct way.

Music is an incomparably more powerful means and is a subtler language for expressing the thousand different moments of the soul's moods.

I was originally a minimalist, so that's my foundation.

And harmony means that the relationship between all the elements used in a composition is balanced, is good.

If people and their manner of living were alike everywhere, there would not be much point in moving from one place to another.

There's a thing about film composing and conducting in my family.

When I was a student, if you accidentally wrote a triad in a piece of yours, it was just sort of like you were breaking the law! You just couldn't do it. And that just meant you were a bad composer.

Composers today get a TV script on Friday and have to record on Tuesday. It's just dreadful to impose on gifted talent and expect decent music under these conditions.

One of the earliest memories I have of feeling the power of film music was watching Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. That was a really clear epiphany for me, when I realized that each film has its own music, and that there was someone out there who wrote this very specific music for just this one film.

If you're doing something new there is always a sense of fear or foreboding, but you're in new ground and you have to get out your machete and cut a new path.

I'll live a lush life in some small dive.

To teach a child an instrument without first giving him preparatory training and without developing singing, reading and dictating to the highest level along with the playing is to build upon sand.

We hope that eventually there would be an occasion which I can personally prove that game music can in fact impress many different people and move them.

As a musician I tell you that if you were to suppress adultery, fanaticism, crime, evil, the supernatural, there would no longer be the means for writing one note.

Joy is not in things; it is in us.

I don't know whether I like it, but it is what I meant.

I noticed things in my computer music that were getting old, and I started to figure out that this has to do with the way the listener interacts with music.

I should be sorry if I only entertained them. I wish to make them better.

My masters are strange folk with very little care for music in them.

I adore art... when I am alone with my notes, my heart pounds and the tears stream from my eyes, and my emotion and my joys are too much to bear.

Brahms' Variations are better than mine, but mine were written before his.

I'm working, but there is so much still to be done! And it frightens me to think of my weight of years. But on we go, without fear or hesitation!

Oh, how miserable it is to have no one to share your sorrows and joys, and, when your heart is heavy, to have no soul to whom you can pour out your woes.

The music is in the air. Take as much as you want.

I realized very early that I was never going to make by living by writing string quartets. But I wanted to write music and I didn't want to have to do anything else.

The first rap record came out in '79, but hip-hop began in '69.

You wouldn't think it would but my parents were really balanced about that. When it came time for me to be out of the house and out on my own they were very supportive.

I have problems with machines which aren't gestural.

The art of music, rather more daughter than imitator of nature, in her impressive and mysterious language minding and educating us, rouses directly our temper and rules us to the depths of our souls.

The first 'Hunger Games' movie was one of those rare films to combine epic storyline, memorable characters and challenging musical opportunities.

When I was a young child my folks would ask me why I was rocking back and forth and I'd answer "cause of the music in my head!"

If you wish in this world to advance your merits you're bound to enhance; You must stir it and stump it, and blow your own trumpet, Or, trust me, you haven't a chance.

My wife has them all in a vault... a copy of every album.

In fact, if you take any group of scores, it's likely that fifty to sixty percent are going to be so much alike that it's difficult to tell any difference among them. But I sometimes wonder if that has more to do with the quality of the art that's being made. There are always those composers who are going to move toward whatever is currently in fashion, there are others who will deliberately attempt to go in another direction. And sometimes, there are composers who will see themselves as being outside the stream and not even try to present their music to the general public.