Quotes & Sayings About Composers

When I am with composers, I say I am a conductor. When I am with conductors, I say I am a composer. — Leonard Bernstein

The record company started as an adjunct to that, to give young composers their first recorded performances; to give young musicians their first debut on a recording. These are all things that big record companies would never touch because there is no money in it! — Gunther Schuller

Musicians and composers have become more adept than ever before to take influence from the figures that they have become devoted to. To them, they are their muses. They are willing to listen to them and to take heed of them when they are looking to be more creative. Today the gender limitations that came with muses have been eliminated and eschewed in favor of an open forum for creativity in today's culture. — Kytka Hilmar-Jezek

Composers are the only people who can hear good music above bad sounds. — John Philip Sousa

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

Not many composers have ideas. Far more of them know how to use strange instruments which do not require ideas. — George Gershwin

In chess, computers show that what we call 'strategy' is reducible to tactics, ultimately. It only looks creative to us. They are still just glorified cash registers. This should make us feel uncomfortable, whether or not we think computers will ever be good composers of music or artistic painters. — Tyler Cowen

And this totally normal conversation unspools from there, covering the basics: family, siblings, school, favorite composers, favorite movies, favorite wood (for carving puppets), the prehistory of the sandwich, and whether the ancient Romans got their togas caught in the spokes of their unicycles — Laini Taylor

Although technical discussions are interesting to composers, I suspect that the truly magical and spiritual powers of music arise from deeper levels of our psyche. — George Crumb

A whole generation of veteran composers has never taken a stand or provided an example and has produced in the music academies generations of docile workers for the music industry. What can you expect from downtrodden workers who see music as a type of profession, like stenography, and not an act of creation that by its nature is subversive? — Itay Talgam

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

In the scientific community you find competent teachers and original researchers, just as in the musical community you find many good performers but very few good composers. — Mario Bunge

New Amsterdam Records, a new label run by composers, has begun documenting this hybrid music, with invigorating discs by the band itsnotyouitsme and the composers Corey Dargel and William Brittelle. — Allan Kozinn

I was very drawn to music of all types, from Beethoven to Jimi Hendrix. There were musicians and composers who obviously were expressing a vision that was beyond the mundane. — Frederick Lenz

Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules ... Mathematicians are more like classical composers. — Brian Greene

I have to say I owe my career to the master composers of the Great American Songbook who have written such high-quality songs - the best popular music ever composed. — Tony Bennett

A mission that comes from the heart to promote these things and to encourage composers to write, then of course they should do it. And there are more than a few pianists these days who do this, fortunately. — Marc-Andre Hamelin

DEAFNESS DOESN'T PREVENT COMPOSERS HEARING THE MUSIC. IT PREVENTS THEM HEARING THE DISTRACTIONS. — Terry Pratchett

When I was a kid, I looked at art as a way of blending everything. One of my favorite composers is Wagner - who coined the term "gesamtkunstwerk," or "total art work." That's what was going on in the 19th century, and the 20th century just kept it going. — DJ Spooky

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

Few of us boggle - though we should - at the fact that Louis Armstrong sang and played trumpet with similar panache, or that Leonard Bernstein and Benjamin Britten were equally adept as composers, conductors and pianists. — Terry Teachout

How vulgar, this hankering after immortality, how vain, how false. Composers are merely scribblers of cave paintings. One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn't, the wolves and blizzards would be at one's throat all the sooner. — David Mitchell

Composers often think in terms of music and not of an instrument itself. — Michala Petri

I am an arrogant and impatient listener, but in the case of a few composers, a very few, when I hear a work I do not like, I am convinced that it is my own fault. Verdi is one of those composers. — Benjamin Britten

Composers were warned not to strain the attention of their audience, as though we had not at our disposal different degrees of attention, among which it rests precisely with the artist himself to arouse the highest. For those who yawn with boredom after ten lines of a mediocre article have journeyed year after year to Bayreuth to listen to the Ring. — Marcel Proust

I sort of enjoy being able to hear what other composers are doing and how they might score something differently than me. I enjoy that part. — Marco Beltrami

Music is of two kinds: one petty, poor, second-rate, never varying, its base the hundred or so phrasings which all musicians understand, a babbling which is more or less pleasant, the life that most composers live. — Honore De Balzac

I would like to see more new productions of new material by new composers/lyricists/book writers. I would like to see people take more chances. I think because everything costs so much they're not taking the chances they used to. — Harold Prince

I regrettably wasted time at university by being overwhelmed and intimidated by the talent of other composers. I felt stuck and didn't know what I was doing there. I enjoyed my experience, but I didn't grab it in the way I would now. — Laura Mvula

It would have been more obvious to go into film, based on the generation before me, but the generation before them were all composers or classical musicians. — Robert Coppola Schwartzman

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. — David Finckel

Composers in the old days used to keep strictly to the base of the theme, as their real subject. Beethoven varies the melody, harmony and rhythms so beautifully. — Johannes Brahms

There's no card, business card, better than a compact disc for a composer. It doesn't half impress people and they get a long way on it ... these composers they will get more performances, more commissions, more recognition just by having that disc — Peter Maxwell Davies

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

More significant than the fact that poets write abstrusely, painters paint abstractly, and composers compose unintelligible music is that people should admire what they cannot understand; indeed, admire that which has no meaning or principle. — Eric Hoffer

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

I'm interested in what happens to music when other people use it. Whereas there are composers who don't like anyone to touch their music, I think people should because they do things I can't think of. — Philip Glass

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

It's nice that all the composers have said that nobody interprets a lyric like Fred Astaire. But when it comes to selling records I was never worth anything particularly except as a collector's item. — Fred Astaire

Perhaps two million years ago the creatures of a planet in some remote galaxy faced a musical crisis similar to that which we earthly composers face today. — George Crumb

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

As far as rock groups, I really like Stone Temple Pilots. As for classical composers, it's Bach. I love Paganini, too, the Italian composer who would break strings during a performance and finish playing on just one string. Someone I would have loved to play with is Jimi Hendrix. — Matt Schulze

Composers are not all good conductors. — Anton Seidl

Themes so vast that only composers could even approach them. If at all. All other artists must practice humility before them. — Jan-Philipp Sendker

I am not one of the great composers. All the great have produced enormously. There is everything in their work - the best and the worst, but there is always quantity. But I have written relatively little. — Maurice Ravel

As to ... old composers like Schubert or Beethoven, I imagine that, while modern music expresses both feeling, thought and imagination, they expressed pure feeling. And you know all day sitting at work, eating, walking, etc., you have hundreds of feelings that can't be put into words. And that is why I think that in a sense music is the highest of the arts, because it really begins where the others leave off. — C.S. Lewis

It may well be that some composers do not believe in God. All of them, however, believe in Bach. — Bela Bartok

On one hand you have a string quartet, which is not a symphony. On the other hand is you have me sampling them and making it sound like there is many more people playing, so the whole notion of, kind of, sampling applied to classical music is very intriguing to me because composers throughout history have borrowed motifs and quotes from one another. — DJ Spooky

The gift that isn't big enough to make a mark, but is too big to leave the possessor in peace. And so they can't be content to be Sunday painters, or poets who write for a few friends, or composers whose handful of delicate little settings of Emily Dickinson can't find a singer. It's a special sort of hell. — Robertson Davies

In America, at the beginning of talkies, they pulled Fred Astaire from the theaters and put him on the screen and had all of these great composers write songs for him. They call it the Great American Songbook; I call it the Fred Astaire Songbook because they were written for him. — Tony Bennett

You do not play a sonata in order to reach the final chord, and if the meanings of things were simply in ends, composers would write nothing but finales. — Alan W. Watts

For a short while she considered the idea of orchestral courtesy. Certainly one should avoid giving political offence: German orchestras, of course, used to be careful about playing Wagner abroad, at least in some countries, choosing instead German composers who were somewhat more ... apologetic. — Alexander McCall Smith

God created music as a common language for all men. It inspires the poets, the composers and the architects. It lures us to search our souls for the meaning of the mysteries described in ancient books. — Khalil Gibran

I can't imagine myself falling for a man who can't cite ten proverbs, five philosophical allusions, and the names of three composers). — Anonymous

Outlaws, like lovers, poets, and tubercular composers who cough blood onto piano keys, do their finest work in the slippery rays of the moon. — Tom Robbins

When the Domaine Musical started up, I wasn't part of it. They were the major players in contemporary music at that time, braodcasting old and new composers' work. And I wasn't one of them. — Luc Ferrari

Then I started listenin' a lot to classical composers. Piano works. Just to see what they were doin'. That sort of put me in a different groove to try to blend all that in. — Mose Allison

Dietz and Schwartz have sort of fallen by the wayside a little bit, and they are up there with Rodgers and Hart and Irving Berlin and Cole Porter. They are the finest of the revue composers - their stuff is so good and so strong. — Douglas Carter Beane

In Hollywood, the rainbow hits the ground for composers. — Hoagy Carmichael

All great musical composers have been connected, consciously or unconsciously, with this source of music-a fact that enabled them to become masters of their art. Their compositions contain specific messages brought through from high realms for the definite purpose of bettering world conditions and bestowing upon mankind greater illumination. — Corinne Heline

The first year I started in San Francisco, there was an American work on every program and there's been a lot of music by living composers and gradually that was part of the process of getting the audience really to trust me. — Michael Tilson Thomas

Music is a continuum and the modern and avant-garde composers of today will be part of the standard repertoire 30 years from now. — Neville Marriner

So you're a real person! I always thought you were a legendary figure, like unicorns or Giuseppe Verdi. — Lemony Snicket

All great composers of the past spent most of their time studying. Feeling alone won't do the job. A man also needs technique. — George Gershwin

I tend to listen to the classical composers: Rachmaninov, Satie. — Enya

It's so interesting, you know, whenever you read the accounts of composers playing their own music, that they had very different priorities than performers. None of them seemed too concerned about the plastic realization of their music. — Helene Grimaud

Composers and lyricists are not responsible for storyline and casting. One can imagine actors shouldering this responsibility, since they charge for half the film. But producers never ask actors to share the losses. Instead, they train their guns on composers and lyricists. — Shaan

I think the thing's that perhaps sad really is that younger people haven't come in and I think it must have been absolutely fantastic to have worked in the 50's when you had all of the great Broadway composers and when West Side Story didn't win the Tony Award. — Andrew Lloyd Webber

The Western musical canon came about not merely by accumulation, but by opposition and subversion, both to the ruling powers on whom composers depended for their livelihoods and to other musics. — Brian Ferneyhough

Film composers are the most prolific music makers on this planet, and most of us are, like, losing our minds if we're doing five or more movies in a year. — Christopher Young

The best results come when people believe in and feel strongly about the music they are playing. Just as composers write for certain types of performers, performers are also looking for certain things. — Michael Hersch

I think there's just been this "thing" that's developed, this way that we have of talking about our music that alienates people. And I fall into that too! I learned that in graduate school. You just talk about your music in a specific way, and that separates people from you. But some composers like that. Schoenberg liked that. He wanted to feel that he was making music for an elite few. That's fine for him, but I want to set myself free from that sort of attitude. — Missy Mazzoli

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. — Ralph Steiner

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

Composers now just don't have the depth of inspiration for melody. Most of the lyrics of the pop songs you hear today are repetitious. They're almost nursery rhymes, as if written by children - which they are. — Rudy Vallee

I find I'm not one of these composers that are, you know, walking along a beach or walking on the mountainside in County Donegal that's, you know, 'Oh, a melody.' It's more a matter of eventually taking that moment with me to the studio, and it begins to evolve. — Enya

There is a line somewhere in Wozzeck that translates out to, roughly, 'The world is awful.' Yes, I said to myself as I shot across the Bay Bridge not giving a fuck how fast I drove, that sums it up. That is high art: 'The world is awful.' That says it all. This is what we pay composers and painters and the great writers to do: tell us this; from figuring this out, they earn a living. What a masterful, incisive insight. What penetrating intelligence. A rat in a drain ditch could tell you the same thing, were it able to talk. If rats could talk, I'd do anything they said. — Philip K. Dick

The problem with composers is that they are the most unrequired job in America. — Gail Zappa

It was about finding creative, original musicians. Musicians who are strong composers. Flexible, empathetic musicians, who are great individually but who also have a great sense for cooperation and collaboration, great listeners as well as great players. — Joshua Redman

Quincy Jones' autobiography 'Q' is very good. Because he's a master at music, he's one of our greatest composers, and its good for him to have a book and tell the good ole days when he was with Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan and Ray Charles. — Ice Cube

Occasionally I hear a band that blows me away. For instance, there's a musician in Oakland named Weasel Walter who has a band called the Flying Luttenbachers. Go see the Flying Luttenbachers when they're in your town. He's one of the greatest rock composers who ever lived, and he's struggling and living like a poverty-stricken hermit. — Glenn Branca

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

We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience. — Brian Eno

Handel's yearning for independence from the traditional chains of patronage and his persistence in monitoring his productions resulted with unique developments concerning Baroque 'opera seria'; however, paradoxically his personal obsession to obtain complete artistic freedom generated disastrous side-effects that eventually impeded the progress of opera in London. — E.A. Bucchianeri

Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries. — Brian Ferneyhough

Composers are influenced by all the important music in their lives - and I suppose that since radio started playing popular music, that's as likely to be The Beatles or Aphex Twin as it is to be Verdi or Ravel. — Jonny Greenwood

You know creators, composers, need a palette for life, a color for life. — Mstislav Rostropovich

Improvisation was the blood and bone of jazz, and in the classic, New Orleans jazz it was collective improvisation in which each performer, seemingly going his own melodic way, played in harmony, dissonance, or counterpoint with the improvisations of his colleagues. Quite unlike ragtime, which was written down in many cases by its composers and could be repeated note for note (if not expression for expression) by others, jazz was a performer's not a composer's art. — Russell Lynes

Let us not forget that the greatest composers were also the greatest thieves. They stole from everyone and everywhere. — Pablo Casals

Gorecki, you know, there's a kind of personal thing there for me. I had, you know, kind of become obsessed with that sort of Soviet Bloc period. And actually, a lot of composers in the Soviet Bloc - Gorecki's not the only one - are writing for the harpsichord as a sort of reaction against enforced Soviet realism, expressionism, sort of enforced modernism. — Mahan Esfahani

I've got a collection of songs that I've had, I keep adding to and they're all great American composers. I wanted to showcase American composers and I've done that on a lot of my records and played things by American composers that I really respect. — Charlie Haden

Other composers have taken this particular technique much further than I in the meantime, with the result that the Law of Diminishing Returns has begun to apply. — Brian Ferneyhough

In the civilization of our times, it is normal, and almost obligatory, for cookery and fashion to take up most of the culture sections, for chefs and fashion designers now enjoy the prominence that before was given to scientists, composers and philosophers. Gas burners, stoves and catwalks meld, in the cultural coordinates of our time, with books, laboratories and operas, while TV stars and great footballers exert the sort of influence over habits, taste and fashion that was previously the domain of teachers and thinkers — Mario Vargas-Llosa

Cope's bot can string together notes that weave in and out with the power of Beethoven or the finesse of Mozart. That a machine can produce things of such beauty is threatening to many in the music community. "If you've spent a good portion of your life being in love with these dead composers and along comes some twerp who claims to have this piece of software that can move you in the same way, suddenly you're asking yourself, 'What's happened here?'" Cope says. "I'm messing with some very powerful relationships. — Christopher Steiner

The musical culture in the United States has no doubt suffered severe setbacks, especially in funding, since the early 2000's. However, I've been amazed at the resiliency of those involved with contemporary music in this country. I think composers and those dedicated to contemporary music have reacted with tremendous creativity and resourcefulness. — Michael Hersch

Concert pianists get to be quite chummy with dead composers. They can't help it. Classical music isn't just music. It's a personal diary. An uncensored confession in the dead of night. A baring of the soul. Take a modern example. Florence and the Machine? In the song 'Cosmic Love,' she catalogs the way in which the world has gone dark, distorting her, when she, a rather intense young woman, was left bereft by a love affair. 'The stars, the moon, they have all been blown out. — Marisha Pessl

Every orchestra I know, every opera house I know, is desperately looking around trying to find new talent, new composing talent, supporting young composers, supporting new ideas, supporting new ways of getting the message across. — Esa-Pekka Salonen

Many nights, Ai-ming said, ignoring my question, her father's music pulled her from sleep. Sparrow, she slowly pieced together, had been one of Shanghai's most renowned composers. But after the Conservatory was shut down in 1966 and all five hundred of its pianos destroyed, Sparrow worked in a factory making wooden crates, then wire, and then radios, for two decades. Ai-ming heard him humming fragments of music when he thought no one was listening. Eventually she came to understand that these fragments were all that remained of his own symphonies, quartets and other musical works. The written copies had been destroyed. — Madeleine Thien

It is possible I never learned the names of birds in order to discover the bird of peace, the bird of paradise, the bird of the soul, the bird of desire. It is possible I avoided learning the names of composers and their music the better to close my eyes and listen to the mystery of all music as an ocean. It may be I have not learned dates in history in order to reach the essence of timelessness. It may be I never learned geography the better to map my own routes and discover my own lands. The unknown was my compass. The unknown was my encyclopedia. The unnamed was my science and progress. — Anais Nin

Bad facts make bad law, and people who write bad laws are in my opinion more dangerous than songwriters who celebrate sexuality. Freedom of speech, freedom of religious thought, and the right to due process for composers, performers and retailers are imperiled if the PMRC and the major labels consummate this nasty bargain. — Frank Zappa