A Quote by George Perle

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

Quote Author

George Perle
American - Composer
May 6, 1915 - January 23, 2009

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

Ned Rorem

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

Music critics have made it quite clear that any composer who ever contributed a four-bar jingle to a film was to be referred to as a 'Hollywood composer' from then on, even if the rest of his output were to consist solely of liturgical organ sonatas.

Andre Previn

I don't ascribe to the idea of the ivory tower composer who sits alone in a room composing his masterpieces and then comes down from Mount Sinai with the tablets. It doesn't work like that. The job of a composer is putting something down on a piece of paper that will inspire the person who's playing.

John Zorn

I always wanted to be a composer, and I sort of went in to NYU as pre-med because I just thought, 'Well... who actually becomes a composer?'

Alan Menken

Composer” is a word which here means “a person who sits in a room, muttering and humming and figuring out what notes the orchestra is going to play.” This is called composing. But last night, the Composer was not muttering. He was not humming. He was not moving, or even breathing. This is called decomposing.

Daniel Handler

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

When I was 20, Shostakovich was my favorite composer. I still find his Fifth Symphony wonderful, with its outstanding themes and rhythms. That's the piece that made me want to be a classical composer.

Dave Brubeck

Notes are part of life for any composer for hire. There's no way around it. I think anyone who has done even a small number of films as a professional composer gets used to that idea pretty quickly.

Christophe Beck

When you hear composer, you think, like, Beethoven: guy in a powdered wig, at a piano, furiously scribbling on manuscript paper. That's not the only image that a composer should bring up, you know. But that's kind of what we've said it is.

Rhiannon Giddens

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

Perhaps within the next hundred years, science will perfect a process of thought transference from composer to listener. The composer will sit alone on the concert stage and merely 'think' his idealized conception of his music. Instead of recordings of actual music sound, recordings will carry the brainwaves of the composer directly to the mind of the listener.

Raymond Scott

Every composer's music reflects in its subject-matter and in its style the source of the money the composer is living on while writing the music.

Virgil Thomson

Elizabeth Lutyens was the first professional composer that I ever knew. I sent someextremely infantile pieces that I I'd written and got marvellous encouragement andinterest from her... she's certainly the English composer who's influenced me themost.

Richard Rodney Bennett

I have often read critical pieces where the critic said that what the composer was trying to do didn't come off. I have wondered what the critic meant if he didn't know what the composer was trying to do.