A Quote by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich

If you're a composer, there's never a moment you're not working.

Ellen Taaffe Zwilich

Quote Topics

Composer Moment Never Working

Quote Author

Ellen Taaffe Zwilich
American - Composer
Born: April 30, 1939

To make good films, you have to have a good relationship and good collaboration as composer-director, composer-editor, composer-production designer-actor because you're working with the actors on screen.

Howard Shore

It's really been enlightening for me to work with composers because I used to think that everything in the music was exactly what the composer meant. Well, it's what the composer meant in that moment when they wrote it.

Hilary Hahn

If a composer could state in words what being a composer means, he would no longer need to be a composer.

Ned Rorem

If I do a play, it's my vision, and everybody else is working on the production to support that. If I do an opera, I feel like part of my job is to support that composer, to try and create something that allows the composer to do his or her best work. In movies, it's usually the director.

David Henry Hwang

Working on a set and working with actors, that's all the same. The moment you're doing it and you're in the moment, you don't have time to think about it. You just have to make it as good as you possibly can on the moment.

Matthijs van Heijningen, Jr.

When you think about a composer you know like Wagner or Pier Boulez or something like that most of the issues a composer is working with are about discreet, notated music that someone else will play.

DJ Spooky

Every bit of theorizing I've ever done, including my interest in Berg, has come as a consequence of discoveries I made as a composer and interests that I developed as a composer. I never thought of my theory as being a kind of irrelevant activity to my composing.

George Perle

The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the listener anticipates on the basis of a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining. If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void. When the composer withholds less, the opposite occurs: he forces us to perform gymnastic exercises more skillful than our own.

Claude Levi-Strauss

To talk about communication theory without communicating its real mathematical content would be like endlessly telling a man about a wonderful composer, yet never letting him hear an example of the composer's music.

John R. Pierce

Perhaps the chief requirement of [the conductor] is that he be humble before the composer; that he never interpose himself between the music and the audience; that all his efforts, however strenuous or glamorous, be made in the service of the composer's meaning - the music itself, which, after all, is the whole reason for the conductor's existence.

Leonard Bernstein

You've all seen movies where the music isn't working with the story. And it's either because... the story isn't working itself. Or the composer kinda just wants to write whatever they want to write, not paying attention to the thing.

Michael Giacchino

Each one of us in Café Tacvba is a composer and we come to the group with songs written out, musically and lyrically. Occasionally, there's a collaboration between us. But each song is almost always written by one of us, and then we all figure out the arrangements. Up until now there hasn't been a moment where the composer explains the song and says, "I want to say this or that." It's always open for interpretation.