Composer Quotes

It's nice to have a great female composer in the program and add her color.

I dare suggest that the composer would do himself and his music an immediate and eventual service by total, resolute and voluntary withdrawal from this public world to one of private performance and electronic media.

It's hard to decide how to match words to music. It's not like it's twice the work. It's always difficult for me to explain to the composer what I'm looking for. I'm not a professional; I lack even basic knowledge about writing music.

I've always been a composer dependent on texts.

Any subject is good for opera if the composer feels it so intently he must sing it out.

A nation creates music - the composer only arranges it.

If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.

Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.

The real composer thinks about his work the whole time; he is not always conscious of this, but he is aware of it later when he suddenly knows what he will do.

I've come up with another formulation about style: that it's essentially a manifestation of a certain habitual set of limitations. It's what a composer does NOT do that defines a style.

You'll know if you're a famous composer if 20 years from now your name appears on a pull-down menu in Band in a Box, alongside Hans Zimmer.

As a major contemporary composer, Madonna should not let the eye dictate to the ear.

I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First to discourage the composer from writing any more and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven.

Intelligent analysis of the composer's intention and strict adherence to it automatically ensures sincerity.

It's not a special taste. An American composer should have something to say to a cab driver.

Which is why, in my lieder concerts, I always strove, when possible, to sing only the works of a single composer, so that the audience could be gradually drawn into a particular creative genius' way of thinking, and could follow him.

I began my career with infantile dreams of becoming a composer.

To me, all writing is like music. And especially dialogue. I studied music in college; that is what I wanted to be, a composer. Acting got me sidetracked.

I think it's good for the composer to teach because you always have new students and you have to begin at the beginning and make things clear.

Any composer who is gloriously conscious that he is a composer must believe that he receives his inspiration from a source higher than himself.

I think Bach is equally a romantic composer because he laid the seeds harmonically for people like Chopin and the great Romantics, Brahms, so it's difficult to you know all this like labelling and putting - I think Bach is attractive to musicians because he supersedes the labels.

The negative is the equivalent of the composer's score, and the print the performance.

I think a composer is always interested in his last work.

Pianists call me a composer, composers call me a pianist. The classicists think me a futurist, and the futurists call me a reactionary.

It's understanding the intention of a composer that allows a producer and an arranger to make those moments speak.

I am writing something which I find satisfying and which I am prepared to put my name to as a composer.

It doesn't necessarily mean at all that the composer plays his own works best.

The further the music develops, the more complex the apparatus used by the composer to express his thoughts becomes.

Soon, I knew that I would become a chemist, rather than a composer.

The difference between the student and the born composer is he really hears the thing, and they have to stage it and manipulate it by technical equipment.