Famous quotes by Composers

"After the Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution, songs became part of the story, as opposed to just entertainments in between comedy scenes"

Stephen Sondheim, Composer

"So many good songs get written fast, because you know exactly what has to work"

Stephen Sondheim, Composer

"In the Rodgers and Hammerstein generation, popular hits came out of shows and movies"

Stephen Sondheim, Composer

"It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of "culture""

John Cage, Composer

"There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing"

John Cage, Composer

"There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot"

John Cage, Composer

"Ideas are one thing and what happens is another"

John Cage, Composer

"We need not destroy the past. It is gone"

John Cage, Composer

"The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature, in her manner of operation"

John Cage, Composer

"We are either going to dissolve as a human race or we are going to break through into a new understanding of what it is to be a human being"

Terry Riley, Composer

"Talking about the all night concerts, I did some of the first all night concerts back in the 60s with this little harmonium, and I also had saxophone taped delays"

Terry Riley, Composer

"In the discovery of secret things and in the investigation of hidden causes, stronger reasons are obtained from sure experiments and demonstrated arguments than from probable conjectures and the opinions of philosophical speculators of the common sort"

William Gilbert, Composer

"I really didn't have a plan, I just went in and started playing. One of my specialties was to be able to play for a really long time without stopping and I would play these repeated patterns for hours and hours and I wouldn't seem to get tired"

Terry Riley, Composer

"Acceleration is finite, I think, according to some laws of physics"

Terry Riley, Composer

"I always voted at my party's call, and I never thought of thinking for myself at all"

William Gilbert, Composer

"You have no idea what a poor opinion I have of myself and how little I deserve it"

William Gilbert, Composer

"My family pride is something inconceivable. I can't help it. I was born sneering"

William Gilbert, Composer

"Music can also be a sensual pleasure, like eating food or sex. But its highest vibration for me is that point of taking us to a real understanding of something in our nature which we can very rarely get at. It is a spiritual state of oneness"

Terry Riley, Composer

"It is important that we are coming up on the millennium because what I am experiencing, just being one person out of billions, is the feeling of acceleration. I experience this through my contact with other people"

Terry Riley, Composer

"Philosophy is for the few"

William Gilbert, Composer

"And I always voted at my party's call, and I never thought of thinking for myself at all"

William Gilbert, Composer

"No one can have a higher opinion of him than I have, and I think he's a dirty little beast"

William Gilbert, Composer

"A good listener truly wants to know the speaker"

John Powell, Composer

"The only love worthy of a name is unconditional"

John Powell, Composer

"More than 90 percent of all the prisoners in our American prisons have been abused as children"

John Powell, Composer

"A person can grow only as much as his horizon allows"

John Powell, Composer

"The barriers are not erected which can say to aspiring talents and industry, 'Thus far and no farther.'"

Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer

"Recommend virtue to your children; it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience"

Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer

"Tones sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes"

Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer

"Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind, but which mankind cannot comprehend"

Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer

Page 12 of 47

See the complete list of composer people