Famous quotes by Composers

"Wagner is a composer who has beautiful moments but awful quarter hours"

Gioachino Rossini, Composer

"One can't judge Wagner's opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don't intend to hear it a second time"

Gioachino Rossini, Composer

"There is a world of difference between a Mahler eighth note and a normal eighth note"

Gustav Mahler, Composer

"There was no one near to confuse me, so I was forced to become original"

Joseph Haydn, Composer

Joseph Haydn

"A nation creates music - the composer only arranges it"

Mikhail Glinka, Composer

"A composer knows that music is written by human beings for human beings and that music is a continuation of life, not something separated from it"

Hanns Eisler, Composer

"The only difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats allow the poor to be corrupt, too"

Oscar Levant, Composer

Oscar Levant

"Beauty must appeal to the senses, must provide us with immediate enjoyment, must impress us or insinuate itself into us without any effort on our part"

Claude Debussy, Composer

Claude Debussy

"Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning"

Igor Stravinsky, Composer

Igor Stravinsky

"To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also"

Igor Stravinsky, Composer

Igor Stravinsky

"The Church knew what the psalmist knew: Music praises God. Music is well or better able to praise him than the building of the church and all its decoration; it is the Church's greatest ornament"

Igor Stravinsky, Composer

Igor Stravinsky

"The more restrictions you have, the easier anything is to write"

Stephen Sondheim, Composer

Stephen Sondheim

"One difference between poetry and lyrics is that lyrics sort of fade into the background. They fade on the page and live on the stage when set to music"

Stephen Sondheim, Composer

Stephen Sondheim

"I chose and my world was shaken. So what? The choice may have been mistaken; the choosing was not. You have to move on"

Stephen Sondheim, Composer

Stephen Sondheim

"I had been interested in Indian music and I actually started studying Tableaus before I met him"

Terry Riley, Composer

Terry Riley

"Friends applaud, the comedy is over"

Ludwig van Beethoven, Composer

Ludwig van Beethoven

"The human voice is the most beautiful instrument of all, but it is the most difficult to play"

Richard Strauss, Composer

"I would advise my young colleagues, the composers of symphonies, to drop in sometimes at the kindergarten, too. It is there that it is decided whether there will be anybody to understand their works in twenty years' time"

Zoltan Kodaly, Composer

"It's ridiculous that time and time again, we need a radioactive cloud coming out of a nuclear power-station to remind us that atomic energy is extraordinarily dangerous"

Pierre Schaeffer, Composer

"It is not hard to compose, but what is fabulously hard is to leave the superfluous notes under the table"

Johannes Brahms, Composer

"In writing music, the structure of each piece is a very important factor"

Leo Ornstein, Composer

"The human voice is the first and most natural musical instrument, also the most emotional"

Klaus Schulze, Composer

Klaus Schulze

"In music one must think with the heart and feel with the brain"

George Szell, Composer

George Szell

"I was blown away by the standing ovation. I've had tributes before, sure, but I don't retain that feeling, and I wasn't prepared for it on Tuesday. But maybe you shouldn't retain these things or you'd be on a permanent high"

Burt Bacharach, Composer

"Style is the dress of thought; a modest dress, neat, but not gaudy, will true critics please"

Samuel Wesley, Composer

Samuel Wesley

"For me it's the instrument. If I want to think of a flute and the state of the arts, I hear a vibrato; I don't know what a flute is unless the person plays it for me"

Morton Feldman, Composer

"Now the big question is: if you are going to go to all the trouble of setting an opera and making all that music and so on, there's got to be some aspect that you can do in an opera that really makes it worth while"

William Bolcom, Composer

"This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before"

Leonard Bernstein, Composer

"A kiss on the hand may be quite continental, but diamonds are a girl's best friend"

Leo Robin, Composer

"Jazz is there and gone. It happens. You have to be present for it. That simple"

Keith Jarrett, Composer

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