Famous quotes by Composers

"Musicians own music because music owns them"

Virgil Thomson, Composer

"I was little impressed with this rough and ready way of persuading people to renew their contracts and decided that I was now quite free of any obligations"

Pietro Mascagni, Composer

"When I was confronted with official tuition, the academic thing, I could see no relationship whatever between that and the music I'd been writing since I was 11"

Harrison Birtwistle, Composer

"The opera tells the story with all the built-in contradictions and from many different angles"

Harrison Birtwistle, Composer

"People say my music is English. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's not me writing English music, but that English music is becoming more like me"

Harrison Birtwistle, Composer

"I didn't have a record player"

Harrison Birtwistle, Composer

"I always write the pieces I want to write"

Harrison Birtwistle, Composer

"When I was younger, I was completely without money - when I was studying in Budapest, when I was a refugee"

Gyorgy Ligeti, Composer

"Perhaps the better word is emotional, yes, I am an emotional man"

Gyorgy Ligeti, Composer

"Once, in London, the BBC asked me what was my favorite English book. I said Alice in Wonderland"

Gyorgy Ligeti, Composer

"New York is the dream world, the center of jazz and rock"

Gyorgy Ligeti, Composer

"I don't read such boring things. Life is too short"

Gyorgy Ligeti, Composer

"Love or not, I wouldn't subject a wife to the road. It's punishment"

Billy Strayhorn, Composer

"If you want something hard enough, it just gets done"

Billy Strayhorn, Composer

"Well, because music is my life and music is not work for me"

Gunther Schuller, Composer

"But somehow, I felt no inclination to be interested in it in any amateur way, let alone professional, until suddenly I became interested. And the first thing I did was to compose: not play an instrument, but to compose"

Gunther Schuller, Composer

"We went through this business of me writing out all the parts for these old songs from Gravity and Speechless and we'd been performing that, but we don't do that any more"

Fred Frith, Composer

"I don't know if I'm striving for anything that I can put into words"

Fred Frith, Composer

"You wouldn't think it would, but my parents were really balanced about that. When it came time for me to be out of the house and out on my own, they were very supportive"

Elmer Bernstein, Composer

"Today you have something like A Film by Joe Harry. That is patently asinine and ridiculous"

Elmer Bernstein, Composer

"One of the things that happens in the business is that success is a very strange thing in that if you are involved in something very successful, the next person wants you to repeat it"

Elmer Bernstein, Composer

"It was a great way to work. In those days, you had to be there. It was your world. It was your club. Your friends were there, your associates were there, your security was there"

Elmer Bernstein, Composer

"Sometimes one can be so closely involved with things that the larger context is lost to view"

Brian Ferneyhough, Composer

"Questioning the nature and implications of liminal instances necessarily involves failure, if only in the specifically technical sense of entering spaces where prevailing criteria of success scarcely apply"

Brian Ferneyhough, Composer

"In any case, the fewer boundaries that exist, hindering free movement between all forms of articulate human cognition, the better"

Brian Ferneyhough, Composer

"I'm perplexed, though, by your application of the term 'negative' to my figural imagery"

Brian Ferneyhough, Composer

"Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries"

Brian Ferneyhough, Composer

"Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced"

Ned Rorem, Composer

"When I speak of "cycles," I am referring to lengthy intervals of relative homogeneity, if not in the resolving of problems, than at least with respect to the consistency of their capacity to productively irritate"

Brian Ferneyhough, Composer

"When I left Europe in 1987, I did so with the thought that my relevance as a composition teacher would benefit from a certain cool distance to certain tendencies I had been observing for several years with increasing disquiet"

Brian Ferneyhough, Composer

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