Famous quotes by Composers

"I find it enormously valuable, to be sure that that the pacing is what I think it is, and that the scenes have the shape I think they have, musically and dramatically"

Carlisle Floyd, Composer

"The story of Willie Stark fascinated me because it was tackling the story of a man who outwardly has all the success one could possibly want and who is destroyed by his personal demons"

Carlisle Floyd, Composer

"Most of the important composers in our country are clustered in the Northeast"

Carlisle Floyd, Composer

"It's necessary to track characters all the way through an opera. If you're dealing with more than one or two characters, it's very easy to forget that the others have lives of their own that feed into the story"

Carlisle Floyd, Composer

"It's amazing how fast generations lose sight of other generations. One of the first things the young composers who come to work with me say is that they want to write music people will like, instead of gaining their credentials by being rejected by the audience"

Carlisle Floyd, Composer

"If an American audience is given a serious musical theater piece that is well produced, dramatically gripping and wonderfully acted, they'll respond to it"

Carlisle Floyd, Composer

"I think anything that is expressed directly and as honestly as possible will last"

Carlisle Floyd, Composer

"We think the Puritans always dressed in black and white, which they didn't. They loved very bright colors. And there were other differences in perceptions that gave one a very different view of them"

Carlisle Floyd, Composer

"We don't have access to a national forum that we had in those days, through the news magazines, which were the television news of the time. It's very disturbing to me that we've sort of been pushed to the corners"

Carlisle Floyd, Composer

"There's the Bacon Society, which is fostered by his fourth wife, Helen Bacon, but I don't know what kind of performances his music gets. He wrote symphonic music and some chorale music"

Carlisle Floyd, Composer

"The artist is something of an outsider in America. I have always felt that America does not value its artists, certainly not in the sense that the Europeans do"

Carlisle Floyd, Composer

"Opera is given so little attention in the national press"

Carlisle Floyd, Composer

"When I've seen my operas in Europe, they have always struck me as more American than when I hear them here. I can't tell you what that phenomenon is"

Carlisle Floyd, Composer

"The performances of my works in the last 10 years are probably equal to all the previous years put together. There are so many venues now and there is a completely new public for opera that's grown up outside of the traditional core opera public"

Carlisle Floyd, Composer

"There is something inherent in our democracy that tends to want to level. America is a little uncomfortable in the presence of someone who is distinctly superior in whatever way!"

Carlisle Floyd, Composer

"Anyone who creates something new or does something different artistically is going to be singled out"

Carlisle Floyd, Composer

"That was my challenge as a composer. Like with anything, to keep yourself interested in doing what you do, you set yourself challenges. So I said, Okay, I'll try to write a hundred tunes in a year"

John Zorn, Composer

"Like you have seven people with their hands up. I gotta make a choice. Y'know, that's tough. Sometimes I gotta go with someone that has an idea and make several calls in a row, because they got an idea"

John Zorn, Composer

"I see myself and many artists like me as the torchbearers through these dark ages"

John Zorn, Composer

"When I'm writing, sometimes it gets to that place where I feel like the piece is writing itself and I'm trying not to get in the way"

John Zorn, Composer

"The idealists will always be in society, and we will survive"

John Zorn, Composer

"I have wit in my work and a sense of humor, but I do not use irony in any way"

John Zorn, Composer

"You can't be idealistic in this world and not be crazy"

John Zorn, Composer

"I run around, I listen to a lot of music, go to a lot of concerts. And when I see someone that gases me, I try to go out of my way to involve them somehow in what I'm doing or get involved in what they're doing"

John Zorn, Composer

"I have about two or three people, we don't have an office, we don't even have a dedicated phone line. We do it out of our own homes, and we make it work"

John Zorn, Composer

"I don't control it at all. It's all up to the musicians in the group. They control it. They make all the cues, and they tell me what they want, and then I act like a mirroring device so that everyone can see what the cues are"

John Zorn, Composer

"That's where I began to ask questions that maybe don't have one specific answer. And the more people you get answers from, the richer the environment becomes"

John Zorn, Composer

"One of the reasons I started Tzadik, which is my own label, is to keep things in print. I got tired of labels dropping things out of print when they don't sell"

John Zorn, Composer

"You know, when we were kids, we had to go to a theater to see a movie. And then television came in and you had to wait until midnight to see the one you wanted to see. Now, all you've got to do is go to a store and buy it and you can watch it whenever you want!"

John Zorn, Composer

"Well, in Japan, I have got a group of musicians that I have worked with a lot, that concentrate just on the hardcore stuff, say, that Naked City has been working on. We have like a repertoire of sixty songs now"

John Zorn, Composer

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