Famous quotes by Composers

"If you think you might have secret information listening to me, you're lost"

Morton Feldman, Composer

"Any professional knows that the flute and the piano is a boring combination. All you've got to arrive at is a kind of typical gestural crap, right? You might agree, though you wouldn't call it gestural crap"

Morton Feldman, Composer

"Since music has never had a Rembrandt, we have remained nothing more than musicians"

Morton Feldman, Composer

"I want to give my compliments to Australia. Ever since your government paid a few million dollars for a Jackson Pollack painting, I figure that it must be a marvellous country"

Morton Feldman, Composer

"Whereas Schaeffer and Henry were working like samplers, their idea was to capture those sounds which couldn't be serially calibrated because they were too complex in character"

Luc Ferrari, Composer

"Well, first I studied piano. I wasn't very satisfied because I though my teachers were dumb... and repressive"

Luc Ferrari, Composer

"I probably went to musique concrete concerts - though not the very first ones - at the beginning of the 50s"

Luc Ferrari, Composer

"In 'thinking up' music, I usually have some kind of a brass band with wings on it in back of my mind"

Charles Ives, Composer

"A rare experience of a moment at daybreak, when something in nature seems to reveal all consciousness, cannot be explained at noon. Yet it is part of the day's unity"

Charles Ives, Composer

"It is conceivable that what is unified form to the author or composer may of necessity be formless to his audience"

Charles Ives, Composer

"If a composer has a nice wife and some nice children, how can he let the children starve on his dissonances?"

Charles Ives, Composer

"What impressed me particularly in Vienna was the strict order everywhere. No mob disturbances of any kind, in spite of the greatly increased liberty and relaxation of police regulations"

Fritz Kreisler, Composer

"Human nerves quickly get accustomed to the most unusual conditions and circumstances, and I noticed that quite a number of men actually fell asleep from sheer exhaustion in the trenches, in spite of the roaring of the cannon about us and the whizzing of shrapnel over our heads"

Fritz Kreisler, Composer

"In jazz, you listen to what the bass player is doing and what the drummer is doing, what the pianist and the guitarist is doing, and then you play something that compliments that, so you are thinking simultaneously and thinking ahead"

David Amram, Composer

"I learned from my uncle that jazz, like symphony music, was built to last"

David Amram, Composer

"I always conceive a piece as a different set of challenges"

John Corigliano, Composer

"Life that only a few hours before had glowed with enthusiasm and exultation, suddenly paled and sickened"

Fritz Kreisler, Composer

"That is what I did with Jack, and that's why he liked to do the readings with me because he knew I was there for him, and for our ability to blend the poetry and the music"

David Amram, Composer

"That is the way a great master carpenter feels, or an architect or composer or anyone who creates anything - people want to be appreciated for what they have done"

David Amram, Composer

"In a jazz atmosphere, the audience members were so quiet and respectful of the musicians that you felt you were almost part of a meeting at a church or a temple, where everyone was completely in tune with the sermon and what the whole event was about"

David Amram, Composer

"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"

John Corigliano, Composer

"Traditions are imploding and exploding everywhere - everything is coming together, for better or worse, and we can no longer pretend we're all living in different worlds because we're on different continents"

Philip Glass, Composer

"My sisters were going out with artists and poets, and eventually it was the creative world which attracted me"

Luc Ferrari, Composer

"I have problems with machines which aren't gestural"

Luc Ferrari, Composer

"You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance"

Charles Ives, Composer

"The fabric of existence weaves itself whole"

Charles Ives, Composer

"When the Domaine Musical started up, I wasn't part of it. They were the major players in contemporary music at that time, braodcasting old and new composers' work. And I wasn't one of them"

Luc Ferrari, Composer

"So much of what we do is ephemeral and quickly forgotten, even by ourselves, so it's gratifying to have something you have done linger in people's memories"

John Williams, Composer

"When I'm dead twenty-five years, people are going to begin to recognize me"

Scott Joplin, Composer

"So the ideology was that: use sounds as instruments, as sounds on tape, without the causality. It was no longer a clarinet or a spring or a piano, but a sound with a form, a development, a life of its own"

Luc Ferrari, Composer

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