A Quote by Stephen Hough

I can admire music where you feel the composer has everything organized and perfectly shaped, but it doesn't touch me. I like to feel that a composer is wounded, like all of us.
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.
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.
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.
It's the vision of the composer that we have to determine, and not the absolute mathematical adherence of the score. In my experience, there have been occasions where I feel that a composer has not notated something as they meant to have it represented.
At the end of the day, I am singing the composer's creation, and I follow the instructions given to me. What I feel may be a right take may not work for the composer or his vision on how he thinks the song should sound.
If a composer could state in words what being a composer means, he would no longer need to be a composer.
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.
My entire education in music was in reading interviews with bands like Stereolab and finding out about Brazilian music or a Romanian composer. You expose yourself to what people you look up to admire.
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.
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.
In a way, the highest praise you could give to a composer like Bach was to take and make your own arrangement; it was sort of an homage to that composer and to his work, so it wasn't considered sacrilegious to do something like that.
In India, I have been called a 'destroyer.' But that is only because they mixed my identity as a performer and as a composer. As a composer I have tried everything, even electronic music and avant-garde. But as a performer I am, believe me, getting more classical and more orthodox, jealously protecting the heritage that I have learned.
See, as a music composer, I am not competing with any music composer.
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.
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.
I feel a composer should not crave to sing songs because songs itself decides its voice. The films where I have given music, I have kept my option for the last. I like to make music and not necessarily singing all the songs.
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