Being A Composer Quotes & Sayings

In any case, Ives encouraged me to go into music even though he himself had such a hard time being a composer. — Elliott Carter

The terms that Sforza Cesarini offered Rossini, 400 Roman Scudi, were not ungenerous, though it must have been galling for Rossini to see the Figaro, Luigi Zamboni, getting almost twice as much, and the Almaviva, Manuel Garcia, being offered three times the amount. Of the first-night cast, only the 'altro buffo', Bartolomeo Botticelli, who played Bartolo, and the 'seconda donna', Elisabetta Lowselet, who played Berta, were paid less than the composer. — Richard Osborne

Oftentimes, if you're talking to a seasoned interviewer who asks you a question, they may do a follow-up if they didn't quite get it. It's rare that they'll do a third or fourth or fifth or sixth follow-up, because there's an implicit, agreed-upon decorum that they move on. Kids don't necessarily move on if they don't get it. — Brian Greene

I happen to love Saint-Saens in general. I think he's a brilliant composer and sometimes underrated in a way because people like to pass him off as fluffy and not being serious. — Joshua Bell

Because I have sixty years of being a professional composer, conductor, musician, whatever, and you develop a lot of friendships and you get involved with a lot of sort of long-term commitments and obligations. — Gunther Schuller

But I never think about dead people. Looking at these old graves makes me think how generation after generation of the same family are all gathered together. And that makes me think about how life goes on, but not about dying. I never think about dying. — John Berendt

One important thing, just being a film composer in general, is to have a great respect for the art that you're working on - a great respect for the film and a great respect for the filmmakers. — Joseph Trapanese

For me, I'm sort of a wanna-be composer, and I love being involved with the arrangements. — Joshua Bell

That is basically me, and although I have done many things in my life - conducting, playing piano, and so on - what is fundamental is my being a composer. — Morton Gould

Madness, it became convenient to believe quite early on, came with the territory, on the order of earthquakes. — Joan Didion

I'm still getting used to being called a composer. A poseur, maybe. — Dhani Harrison

Searching for music is like searching for God. They're very similar. There's an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unseeable, the unspeakable, all those things, comes into being a composer and to writing music and to searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don't exist. — David Bowie

I think that being a film composer, someone that gets it and actually applies the music, it allows you to open up a spectrum of feeling. You're now allowed to approach the music from an audio visual perspective. — Adrian Younge

I love Neutrogena's Makeup Remover Cleansing Wipes. They get all my makeup off and are really moisturizing. — Sarah Hyland

People don't live their lives in a series of scenes that form a dramatic narrative, they don't speak in dialogue, they're not lit by a cinematographer or scored by a composer. The properties of real life and the properties of drama have almost nothing to do with each other. The difference between writing about reporters and being a reporter is the same as the difference between drawing a building and building a building. — Aaron Sorkin

I just scribbled away and eventually a C-major chord was there. I didn't ever decide I was going to be a composer. It was like being tall. It's what I was. It's what I did. — Richard Rodney Bennett

The world hates Christian people if they can see God in them. — G. Campbell Morgan

If you'd died on me, I would've taken it out on your corpse."

Raven Heartstone Celenti to Paladin Carison Destine — Ruth Ford Elward

I'm into horror pictures because I love the fear of being alone in the dark, and I'd recommend that to any composer who wants to work in this genre. — Christopher Young

With the new technology that keeps entering the media, film composers are constantly being placed in new learning situations. Acknowledging this and realizing that one must keep up, I maintain, nonetheless, that the real creative power is in the mind and heart of the composer. — Henry Mancini

Inside of each of us is greatness let us treat those around us as if they are much more than they appear. Let us treat each other with kindness and respect. — Steffani Raff

Never buy anything from someone who is out of breath. — Burton Malkiel

I think of all music as existing in the substance of the air itself. It is the composer's task to order and make sense of sound, in time and space, to communicate something about being alive through music. — Libby Larsen

If a composer could state in words what being a composer means, he would no longer need to be a composer. — Ned Rorem

I am a composer first and foremost, and have always believed that being able to write memorable melodies is what sets musicians apart. My songs bring images to the listener's mind. The object is to transport my listeners to another place, some place sacred and spiritual that will make them glad they took the ride. — Bradley Joseph

I thought about Stockhausen. What had prompted him to call the attacks a work of art? For him, I thought, it was not a matter of finding death beautiful, but rather seeing that someone had taken liberties in reality that an artist could only dream of. That was both the virtue and the vice of art. In art, you can kill with impunity - destroy the world, perpetrate a holocaust, whip up the apocalypse. But it's only art. You can blow up five million people in an opera and not have anywhere near the impact of blowing up five thousand in reality. Stockhausen seemed to realize this, since the terrorism caused him to feel that being a composer was nothing. In that sense, his words were a moral statement about the limits of art, not an immoral statement about aestheticizing destruction. — Supervert

Because we cannot conceive that as we grow up our own minds will become so enlarged and elevated that we ourselves shall then regard as trifling those objects and pursuits we now so fondly cherish, and that, though our companions will no longer join us in those childish pastimes, they will drink with us at other fountains of delight, and mingle their souls with ours in higher aims and nobler occupations beyond our present comprehension, but not less deeply relished or less truly good for that, while yet both we and they remain essentially the same individuals as before. — Anne Bronte

A deaf composer's like a cook who's lost his sense of taste. A frog that's lost its webbed feet. A truck driver with his license revoked. That would throw anybody for a loop, don't you think? But Beethoven didn't let it get to him. Sure, he must have been a little depressed at first, but he didn't let misfortune get him down. It was like, Problem? What problem? He composed more than ever and came up with better music than anything he'd ever written. I really admire the guy. Like this Archduke Trio
he was nearly deaf when he wrote it, can you believe it? What I'm trying to say is, it must be tough on you not being able to read, but it's not the end of the world. You might not be able to read, but there are things only you can do. That's what you gotta focus on
your strengths. Like being able to talk with the stone. — Haruki Murakami

[On suicide:] It's the only cause of death that can be used as a noun to describe the dead person. If you die of cancer you are not called 'a cancer.' If someone else shoots you, you are not referred to as 'a murder.' But if you shoot yourself, you are labeled as a suicide. Your death becomes your definition. — Joan Wickersham

I think a lot of people get intimidated by the language of music, but everyone owns music. I think there's nothing standing in between a composer and her audience. I think a lot of people feel that way because they feel it's rarefied, but it's really not. You should feel the impact of it without being able to name it because it's ultimately a primal thing. — Jeanine Tesori

Every bit of theorizing I've ever done, including my interest in Berg, has come as a consequence of discoveries I made as a composer and interests that I developed as a composer. I never thought of my theory as being a kind of irrelevant activity to my composing. — George Perle

I was in the army, and I had given up the thought of being a composer. — Mitch Leigh

Take me with you. I want a doomed love. I want streets at night, wind and rain, no one wondering where I am. — Michael Cunningham

No ability, no strength and force, no power of intellect or power of wealth, shall avail us, if we have not the root of right living in us. — Theodore Roosevelt

When my heart tells me that something is right, there's rarely an opportunity for logic to intervene. I go with my instinct, and see where it leads. — Fennel Hudson

When we play music we describe the echo the tableau of natural forms, their shapes and arrangements, as uncovered by the composer's imagination, which yet must be filtered through our own. There is no other way. And in acknowledging this tableau, this revelation, we must "hesitate", we must doubt, as the composer doubted, for no valid creation can issue unscarred by doubt, by that vast flux of wonder which precedes the construction of being. — Russell Sherman

Frank [Zappa] said he probably would have been a major criminal, given his brain power and his attention to detail, had he not been a composer. But being a composer is not something you can't help. — Gail Zappa

Music - good music, great music - had a hard, irreducible purity to it. It might be bitter and despairing and pessimistic, but it could never be cynical. If music is tragic, those with asses' ears accuse it of being cynical. But when a composer is bitter, or in despair, or pessimistic, that still means he believes in something. — Julian Barnes

I went to a concert upstairs in Town Hall. The composer whose works were being performed had provided program notes. One of these notes was to the effect that there is too much pain in the world. After the concert I was walking along with the composer and he was telling me how the performances had not been quite up to snuff. So I said, "Well, I enjoyed the music, but I didn't agree with that program note about there being too much pain in the world." He said, "What? Don't you think there's enough?" I said, "I think there's just the right amount. — John Cage

I am a ham. I've no business being rock 'n' roll. I've said it over and over again that I'm a classical composer, dishevelling my personality by dabbling in rock 'n' roll. — John Cale

Rommel could smell the sea. At Torbruk the heat and the dust and flies were as bad as they had been in the desert, but it was all made bearable by that occasional whiff of salty dampness in the faint breeze. — Ken Follett

I don't think they understand it's as important as math and science. It rounds you out as a person. I think it gives you a love of certain things. You don't have to become the next great composer. It's just nice to have heard certain things or to have seen certain things. It's part of being a human being. — Marvin Hamlisch