Top 1200 Classical Composers Quotes & Sayings - Page 4

Since Mozart's day composers have learned the art of making music throatily and palpitatingly sexual.

The human attitude of which classical music is the expression is always the same; it is always based on the same kind of insight into life and strives for the same kind of victory over blind change. Classical music as gesture signifies knowledge of the tragedy of the human condition, affirmation of human destiny, courage, cheerful serenity.

Still, American composers working in France have had a pretty hard time.

By the cigars they smoke, and the composers they love, ye shall know the texture of men's souls.

I've heard though that there is a younger generation of tonal French composers who are reacting with vigour.

My advice to composers is, 'Try to reach 90, and everyone will love you.'

Like many composers, most of my compositions are influenced by the music I've listened to throughout my life.

You can't have Bach, Mozart and Beethoven as your favorite composers. They simply define what music is!

In the beginning, many composers didn't have confidence in me. It's not their fault. It only comes after you've delivered your first hit.

If we want to share the message of the composers, to give good things back to humanity, we have to dig deep while we can.

Two pieces of advice for young composers: Go away during technical rehearsals. And do not have a back operation.

The Russian composers, especially, tricked the symphony orchestra into the kind of dynamic, rhythmic thing

What inspires me is not so much the music as the opportunity to interact with composers. I think that has driven everything I've done.

I came across a lot of young composers who have got passion but lack experience. I want to help them out.

I think a lot of composers get into trouble just making up a plot and expecting an audience to follow that.

The Russian composers, especially, tricked the symphony orchestra into the kind of dynamic, rhythmic thing.

The number of e-mails and letters that I get from choreographers, from sculptors, from composers who are being inspired by science is huge.

There are so many different ways to talk and think about art. We just spoke about when attitude becomes form. But when I was a kid, I had these two art teachers, a couple, who were continuing a line of very classical, atelier art training, and they instilled in me a sensitivity to all the classical verities of line, shape, color, texture, and composition, which is only engaging if you're making two-dimensional objects.

When I was nine years old, I started playing guitar, and I took classical guitar lessons and studied music theory. And played jazz for a while. And then when I was around fourteen years old, I discovered punk rock. And so I then tried to unlearn everything I had learned in classical music and jazz so I could play in punk rock bands.

One day the 'Maple Leaf' will make me King of Ragtime Composers.

The composers know what they want from you. So as a vocalist you have got to trust them and surrender yourself to their vision.

The great opera composers were so good at their job, that the whole genre came to be built around the concept of the composer's vision.

If you look at the image [ Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self ], it treads on a kind of popular stereotypical image of the black figure, in both its flatness and slightly comic edge. To take that image as a starting point and to render it in a proto-classical medium, like egg tempera, and then use a repertoire of classical compositional devices to make the picture was a way of setting up an engagement with art history.

Composers should write tunes that chauffeurs and errand boys can whistle.

What the world wants, what the world is waiting for, is not Modern Poetry or Classical Poetry or Neo-Classical Poetry - but Good Poetry. And the dreadful disreputable doubt, which stirs in my own skeptical mind, is doubt about whether it would really matter much what style a poet chose to write in, in any period, as long as he wrote Good poetry.

When I came into films, I found a vacuum in the field of lyricists, writers and composers.

Too much horsing around with unrealistic stances and classic forms and rituals is just too artificial and mechanical, and doesn't really prepare the student for actual combat. A guy could get clobbered while getting into this classical mess. Classical methods like these, which I consider a form of paralysis, only solidify and constrain what was once fluid. Their practitioners are merely blindly rehearsing routines and stunts that will lead nowhere.

My favourite composers are Vishal Shekhar, AR Rahman, Shankar Ehsaan-Loy.

I have always loved composers who have been connected with folk traditions of popular music.

I think if there's ever been a time we need music more, it's now. For our kids, it teaches you to take time, to listen, to work together, to listen to other people, and to use your brain. That's why classical music doesn't work when you throw it at people in a subway platform while they're rushing to work. Classical music is something that needs to be contemplated, you have to be completely present with an active mind that's working. It's not background music.

Composers are the only people who can hear good music above bad sounds.

I wouldn't know anything about opera music if it wasn't for Bugs Bunny. That was my entire introduction to opera music. I wouldn't know anything about classical music if it wasn't for "Fantasia." They didn't have to do that stuff. They chose to base this ridiculous, funny, intriguing, creative story on this beautiful classical music. It's the combination of the high and the low that I thought was very cool. But I had no concept of it as a kid.

I listen only to Bach, Beethoven or Mozart. Life is too short to waste on other composers.

composition is notation of distortion of what composers think they've heard before. Masterpieces are marvelous misquotations.

I don't meet stockbrokers or carpenters or coal miners; I spend all day with actors, composers and photographers.

Tom Kitt aside - he's in his own category with me, of course - Stephen Sondheim is one of my all-time favorite composers.

A lot of composers I know hate temp scores because people get attached to them.

I can say, with a little arrogance, that I could be an actor, a cameraman, a writer, but composers are the most mysterious people.

Our job as composers becomes easy when directors have a good knowledge of music and know exactly what they want.

Composers, like authors, have a lot in common. Our main goal is to connect with the listener emotionally.

I got my first break in 'Bhootnath,' solely on my credit, and went on to sing for around 20 films for all the leading music composers.

A lot of composers before me have been on this mission to change the world by getting off equal temperament, and I'm definitely one of those.

I've seen composers work on 30 films at one go. So, eight or even 10 albums in a year is no big deal.

There are wonderful composers and librettists out there. It's the lack of creative producers that is troubling.

Time is the main subject for any musicians, music writers, composers.

Classical is a more refined and structured dance form. Folk is made for celebration. That's not a very competitive dance form. Though you can bring classical on stage, folk becomes limited. Like you would love to do bhangra and garba at parties, but when you see it on stage, it is very limited in terms of movements.

Composers are in some ways the last frontier of musician that gets a paycheck for their musical services.

The September 11 attacks were the greatest work of art in the cosmos...compared to that, we composers are nothing

I admire Turgenev, Camus, Proust and Shakespeare, but I've also learnt a lot about writing from composers and artists.

I'm the benefactor of people who are doing so much hard work championing women composers.

Being a classical musician I'm fascinated with how my colleagues, not just singers, but every musician finds ways to express something else or something new or the same ol', same ol' in classical music. I'm always in dialogue with other musicians at least orally, if I can't be with them and a lot of dead musicians as well. I've learned a lot from dead people on recordings.

I always loved the motion picture scores and the great film composers like Elmer Bernstein.

Composers and musicians have always starved and, as this is a sentimental country, we think the tradition should be continued.

I'm blessed to be working with wizards like Vishal Bhardwaj as well as many young composers.

The team at ASCAP is a genuine family, and I am proud to be part of an organization that is home to so many legendary songwriters and composers.

I am getting to work with some good musicians, artistes, and composers.

It's good that Bollywood is changing and directors are trying out Pakistani singers as composers.

What gives Bach and Mozart a place apart is that these two great expressive composers never sacrificed form to expression.

I used to do Korean classical music and started training to join an idol group after someone set me up an interview with my current agency. The common thing between Korean classical music and becoming a singer is that I get to go on stage which why I decided to get professional training for K-pop music without holding any bias.

Composers, artists, actors, singers - all of them, I think, unconsciously learn from others. I'm sure it's not conscious, but they can't help it.