Famous quotes by Composers

"Although I had resigned my commission as an officer two years before, I immediately left Switzerland, accompanied by my wife, in order to report for duty. As it happened, a wire reached me a day later, calling me to the colors"

Fritz Kreisler, Composer

"We met with the poet Frank O'Hara, who was a link between Upper and Lower Bohemia, and who worked at the Museum of Modern Art, where we had hoped to do the readings"

David Amram, Composer

"Even before he had one book published, Jack was one of those people you could feel was very special"

David Amram, Composer

"Allen Ginsberg was a world authority on the writing of William Blake, and had an incredible knowledge of classic literature and world politics"

David Amram, Composer

"Franz Kline, who became known for his black and white paintings, did a whole series of gorgeous landscapes and wonderful portraits that may still hang in Greenwich Village"

David Amram, Composer

"A few years later, my Uncle David took me to the Earle Theatre to hear Duke Ellington"

David Amram, Composer

"I have tremendous respect for film composers"

John Corigliano, Composer

"You become a great composer when you win a Pulitzer. But I think that now it's a completely meaningless award"

John Corigliano, Composer

"Eighty percent of my pieces gravitate towards an A, as a tonal thing, not at the beginning, but somewhere in it"

John Corigliano, Composer

"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"

John Corigliano, Composer

"Suddenly, at about ten o'clock, a dull thud sounded somewhere far away from us, and simultaneously we saw a small white round cloud about half a mile ahead of us where the shrapnel had exploded. The battle had begun"

Fritz Kreisler, Composer

"Signs of fatigue soon manifested themselves more and more strongly, and slowly the men dropped out one by one, from sheer exhaustion. No murmur of complaint, however, would be heard"

Fritz Kreisler, Composer

"My wife volunteered her services as Red Cross nurse, insisting upon being sent to the front, in order to be as near me as could be, but it developed later that no nurse was allowed to go farther than the large troop hospitals far in the rear of the actual operations"

Fritz Kreisler, Composer

"In trying to recall my impressions during my short war duty as an officer in the Austrian Army, I find that my recollections of this period are very uneven and confused"

Fritz Kreisler, Composer

"When today's generation reads Jack's books or they listen to the music created by some of us, I believe that they see there is a different way of approaching today's life and today's sometimes seeming hopelessness that can provide answers"

David Amram, Composer

"The Upper Bohemia people wore tuxedos in an art gallery, and Lower Bohemia was all of us"

David Amram, Composer

"In symphonic music, when you are conducting, you do the same thing. You are feeling the whole orchestra, thinking ahead so you can prepare for a change"

David Amram, Composer

"What I think of as style - and I've gotten to this over years of really thinking about it - is that style is the unconscious choices I make"

John Corigliano, Composer

"I don't think that the Pulitzer should be given the way it is. I think the competition should be anonymous. I think completely different people would win it if the names were taken off because a lot of it is done on relationships and names"

John Corigliano, Composer

"Art is not only about angst"

John Corigliano, Composer

"You explain how it went, and as far as you can figure out how it got that way"

Virgil Thomson, Composer

"I let her alone, and when she got that finished, she left me alone. We trusted each other"

Virgil Thomson, Composer

"The silver swan, who, living, had no note, When death approached unlocked her silent throat"

Orlando Gibbons, Composer

"When I was a kid, I wrote music - from the age of 11 until the age of 18"

Harrison Birtwistle, Composer

"Minimalism now is a reaction to what came before. It's absolutely of its time. Music moved into the set theory thing, and moved out of it"

Harrison Birtwistle, Composer

"Then, after the war, it was impossible to travel, after so many years of Hitler and Stalin"

Gyorgy Ligeti, Composer

"Stravinsky used Mother Goose. He was influenced by Mother Goose, indirectly, but very beautifully"

Gyorgy Ligeti, Composer

"People often thought Leopold Auer was Russian because he lived in St. Petersburg so long, almost fifty years"

Gyorgy Ligeti, Composer

"My grandmother played the piano, and I used to toddle over there and pick out little things that sounded good to me"

Billy Strayhorn, Composer

"All music is beautiful"

Billy Strayhorn, Composer

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