A Quote by Barbara Harbach
Who can forget the music of the French composer Germaine Tailleferre? These are just a few composers whose aesthetic ideals we all share, and there are many more women creators writing stunning and exciting music, and I wish I had space to list them all!
Related Quotes
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.
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.
When I finally got together with Rostropovich as a student, he was very focused, almost entirely focused on the music itself, on what the composer had in mind and what he knew about the composer. Many of the works that I played for him had in fact been composed and written for him; he was often the first performer of these works, having known the composers personally.
The artist must forget the audience,
forget the critics, forget the technique, forget everything but love for the music.
Then, the music speaks through the performance,
and the performer and the listener will walk together
with the soul of the composer, and with
God.
These days I think the composers of music influence me more than any photographers or visual creators. I see something exciting or lovely and think to myself: 'If Papa Haydn or Wolfgang Amadeus or the red-headed Vivaldi were here with a camera, they'd snap a picture of what's in front of me.' So I take the picture for them.
There's still not as many women in music as men, and I don't really know why. I don't have the answers. I do wish there were more women that played music.
When I'm writing film music, I feel like I'm more a filmmaker than a composer. It's more about what the film needs. I'm basically part of the team that's creating a film, and the music is a very important part, but it's just one part of many.
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.
What keeps me motivated to create new music is the joy of songwriting. The joy of being creative. The joy of writing a poem or essay. Writing anything. I just love writing, whether it is music or words. I just didn't need to share it for the last 18 years. When you share it, it brings on other things, which is good.
Some composers end up writing for the guitar as they would write piano music or, more often, harp music. It isn't the same.
I love the music of Lauryn Hill and Erykah Badu and more recently the music of Laura Marling. All these women share a strength and a wisdom in their voices and music that really makes me want to make music and sing.
The culture of suppressing women composers and performers goes centuries back in Germany and other countries. Just think of Fanny Mendelssohn and the struggles she and many other women had to endure to get their music recognized. How many women's compositions were left to languish in attics, only to be thrown out by future generations! So much has been lost over the centuries.
I studied French forever, and when do I ever speak French? I clearly should have studied Spanish. I wish I had stuck with music, because that would still be great. I really wish I had learned to surf earlier in my life.
I had great inspiration from a Japanese composer named Toru Takemitsu. He wrote over 90 film scores and a lot of concert music, a lot of classical music, and he gave me a lot of inspiration, as well as composers from other countries.
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.
Once I tried to find myself as a musician and a composer, I went back and saw that there was something special about Puerto Rican music. I knew that before, but had never sat down and thought about it. The more I learned about it, the more it found its way into the music I was writing.
