Composer Quotes

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

If you only do little clusters - three or four songs by one, and another, and then yet another - you lose the opportunity to think your way into the composer's mind, since, after all, most of these pieces are quite brief.

There's still a lot I need to do as a player, as a musician, as a sound creator. I have commissioned 170 pieces: that's still not enough, there are still lots and lots of composers I would like to approach. When I see a composer and I see a performer, I think to combine those forces.

I find respect for a mediocre British composer, as opposed to a really good American, ridiculous because they automatically respect a composer if he's from England.

Remember always that the composer's pen is still mightier than the bow of the violinist; in you lie all the possibilities of the creation of beauty.

I can think and play stuff in classical music that possibly violinists who didn't have access to other types of music could never do. It means I'm more flexible within classical music, to be a servant to the composer.

I've had those people very interested in my writing. Since I think of myself as a composer, I feel really good. I've had lots of guys call me up. I've gotten two or three commissions to write things. I've written lots of movie scores.

I don't think a guy that really has no understanding about people, or has no interest in understanding people would make a good film composer.

If I belong to a tradition, it is a tradition that makes the masterpiece tell the performer what to do, and not the performer telling the piece what it should be like, or the composer what he ought to have composed.

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

Why should the composer be more guilty than the poet who warms to fantasy by a strange flame, making an idea that inspires him the subject of his own very different treatment?

To judge a composer's work, one must consider it as a whole.

Other, far fewer, directors are more like the composer - conceptualizing the piece, scoring it, distributing its musical lines among a range of registers, chords, and instruments.

The thing about influence is that any composer worth anything will give you the same names.

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

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

I feel very free and very happy to be a composer.

I really liked doing a number of the projects and directors, and etc., etc., I knew about half-way through that I would never be doing that again. It's just not me. I really am happy as a part-time film composer, not a full-time film composer.

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

I think the composer and production staff of an opera have a real responsibility to use visual elements of all kinds to make clear to the American audience, at any rate, exactly what is going on.

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.