A Quote by Michael Hersch

I think the tendency to paint composers or styles of music with too broad a brush - for example, identifying composers as writers of "simple" or "complex" music - has become increasingly problematic and is almost never productive.

Michael Hersch

Quote Author

Michael Hersch
American - Composer
Born: June 25, 1971

Even experimental composers, revolutionary composers, self-styled radicals are, in writing revolutionary music, recognizing the music that preceded them precisely by trying to avoid it.

Leonard Bernstein

Composers are influenced by all the important music in their lives - and I suppose that since radio started playing popular music, that's as likely to be The Beatles or Aphex Twin as it is to be Verdi or Ravel. They'd be strange teenagers if they didn't. But cross-pollinating happens too - Aphex Twin did more interesting things with electronic music than most trained composers, who seemed to approach samplers with undue caution and reverence in those early days.

Jonny Greenwood

I want young Indian composers to be able to do more than just film music. I want to give them the skills that will enable them to create their own palette of sounds instead of having to write formulaic music. It doesn't matter if they become sound engineers, producers, composers or performers - I want them to be as imaginative as they like.

A. R. Rahman

Communists love to make films about composers because composers compose music and don't talk subversive things.

Milos Forman

Communists love to make films about composers, because composers compose music and don't talk subversive things.

Milos Forman

A whole generation of veteran composers has never taken a stand or provided an example and has produced in the music academies generations of docile workers for the music industry. What can you expect from downtrodden workers who see music as a type of profession, like stenography, and not an act of creation that by its nature is subversive?

Itay Talgam

I think, you know, for someone who does play, let's say, old music or, you know, Baroque music or Renaissance music - and you know, and I do play a lot of that, obviously - engaging with new composers, engaging with young composers, is really exciting because it makes me look at people of the past in a very different way that they are also living, that there was a lot of subjectivity in the decisions that they were making.

Mahan Esfahani

There was this kind of dictatorship of the Darmstadt school, composers like Boulez and Stockhausen, who were very strict and orthodox. They would not allow other composers to write the music they wanted to write, and only a certain kind of music could be played.

Krzysztof Penderecki

Is there a gender gap in the music industry? It is true that there are more professional male music creators than female. For some reason, it's taking a lot longer in music than in literature and the visual arts to reach equilibrium. It was almost acceptable by the 19th century for female writers to be published, yet it's only in the last couple of decades, since about 1980, that historical female composers have really emerged.

Barbara Harbach

There are, however, composers whose music can only be heard in a chromatic sense. George Perle, for example, wrote pieces that you might think of as leaning in a tonal direction but it's very hard to register a pitch as, say, the sixth degree of a scale, whereas in much of my music I think that's often relatively easy to do.

Paul Lansky

The great composers I worked with along the way, I always felt they were filmmakers more than composers. They would talk about the story rather than the music.

Steven Price

New Amsterdam Records, a new label run by composers, has begun documenting this hybrid music, with invigorating discs by the band itsnotyouitsme and the composers Corey Dargel and William Brittelle.

Allan Kozinn

If you look at the history of music, you have classical composers, church music, pop music, etc. Music that's existed for centuries. I think there are some songs that are close to immortal. They will last longer than we will in this lifetime.