A Quote by Samuel Barber

I guess, for better or for worse, I am an American composer, and I've had a wonderful life being exactly that. — © Samuel Barber
I guess, for better or for worse, I am an American composer, and I've had a wonderful life being exactly that.
When we look at the arts and letters in America, especially if we look at poetry, and poetry set to music, this dialogue, we have this very powerful beautiful, eclectic, diary, or narration of being in America, being American, participating in America, becoming more of America and also as an American, the American creative spirit, which is quite interesting. Our composers and poets have spent more time writing and thinking and speaking out of what it means to be a composer or poet as well as to be an American, or a composer or poet In America; both relationships.
I am a passionate, committed composer, and the guy I used to write musicals with, once he was able to ditch me and get a better composer, actually won the Tony.
Things swept so badly that I had distrust - after 1967, let's say - of American Keynesianism. For better or worse, U.S. Keynesianism was so far ahead of where it started. I am a cafeteria Keynesian.
If a composer could state in words what being a composer means, he would no longer need to be a composer.
I often feel like that with the way I portray myself I come off as looking much worse than any of the other characters. I guess it might also be worth noting that anyone I've had as a main character in a story I've written has had full knowledge that I am a writer who writes about the people in her life.
Traveling through France in regular times, for better or worse, I am simply perceived as an American.
When I'm writing a play I hear it like music. I use the same indications that a composer does for duration. There's a difference, I tell my students, between a semi-colon and a period. A difference in duration. And we have all these wonderful things, we use commas and underlining and all the wonderful punctuation things we can use in the same way a composer uses them in music. And we can indicate, as specifically as a composer, the way we want our piece to sound.
I am a permanent legal resident of this country, I was born in Korea; my parents came to America for a better life for our family, I've lived here nearly my whole life, and even though I consider myself through and through Korean and American, I guess when it comes down to it, anyone can take away my identity. It doesn't belong to me.
I guess I had a suspicion of it my entire life without knowing exactly what it was - knowing that there was something different about me, which I attributed to being an artist. At 11 or 12 I started sort of clarifying for myself. It took a while.
All my editors since Malcolm Cowley have had instructions to leave my prose exactly as I wrote it. In the days of Malcolm Cowley, with 'On the Road' and 'The Dharma Bums', I had no power to stand by my style for better or for worse.
Racism is worse than ever. Violence is worse than ever. The economy's worse than ever. Unemployment's worse than ever. And it's Democrats that have been running the show, with the first African-American president at the top of the heap, and it didn't get any better?
I had had some months of depression. Not serious enough to keep me from work. So, I guess you'd call that a mild depression. It was becoming worse. And I was being treated for it with anti-depressants.
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.
Trump is a man who, for better or worse, stands in opposition to the institutions that dominate American political life.
I don't think of music as being a competition - what I make is exactly what I want it to be for me, and it's not better or worse than anything else. I'm just trying to be the best at what I am, or that I possibly can be. And when I've done that, I feel incredibly confident and there's nothing anyone can see to dampen that, but I don't think that because it means something to me, it has to necessarily mean something to other people.
I think the composer and production staff of an opera have a real responsibility to use visual elements of all kinds to make clear to the American audience, at any rate, exactly what is going on.
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