Famous quotes by Composers

"The Western musical canon came about not merely by accumulation, but by opposition and subversion, both to the ruling powers on whom composers depended for their livelihoods and to other musics"

Brian Ferneyhough, Composer

"It is still true that it is easier to compose a poem in the form of a manual for adjusting a VCR than it is to write a piece using just tuning as a symphony"

Brian Ferneyhough, Composer

"I frequently compose out the entire metric structure of a piece in modified cyclic form, where each cyclic revolution undergoes some form of 'variation' much as if measure lengths were concrete musical 'material'"

Brian Ferneyhough, Composer

"Unquestionably, our contemporary world of music is far richer, in a sense, than earlier periods, due to the historical and geographical extensions of culture to which I have referred"

George Crumb, Composer

"The future will be the child of the past and the present, even if a rebellious child"

George Crumb, Composer

"I think we're in a very low point of music right now"

George Crumb, Composer

"We are known as one of the few truly antifascist families in Munich"

Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Composer

"When I was 15, I did not know nothing about what concerned the world of music"

Maurice Jarre, Composer

"I began to write a kind of waltz and in a little more than an hour I had the theme written"

Maurice Jarre, Composer

"A Passage to India. It is my favourite movie"

Maurice Jarre, Composer

"Truth is a big concept"

Lukas Foss, Composer

"It is the element I miss in electronic music - no performance, no loving immersion. Maybe that is why I was never particularly drawn to electronic music"

Lukas Foss, Composer

"Writing seems to be more difficult as you move through the years"

George Crumb, Composer

"With Hitchcock I had little relationship. I was called to replace Bernard Herrmann, his favorite composer, in Torn Curtain, after the bitter fight between them"

Maurice Jarre, Composer

"But yes, now I wouldn't do some of those soundtracks the way I did them"

Maurice Jarre, Composer

"To understand Mozart's contradictory qualities would indeed be to understand genius"

Lukas Foss, Composer

"Most people think an artist tries to be original, but originality is the last thing that develops in the artist"

Lukas Foss, Composer

"If one uses music that one does not really love, then one will not succeed in making it one's own"

Lukas Foss, Composer

"Anybody can put things together that belong together. To put things together that don't go together, and make it work, that takes genius like Mozart's. Yet he is presented in the play Amadeus as a kind of silly boy whom the gods loved"

Lukas Foss, Composer

"I can tell you, dearest friend, that if it became known how much friendship, love and a world of human and spiritual references I have smuggled into these three movements, the adherents of programme music - should there be any left - would go mad with joy"

Alban Berg, Composer

"Competitions are for horses, not artists"

Bela Bartok, Composer

"Music is neither old nor modern: it is either good or bad music, and the date at which it was written has no significance whatever"

Peter Warlock, Composer

"These seem to me so ambiguous, so vague, so easily misunderstood in comparison to genuine music, which fills the soul with a thousand things better than words"

Felix Mendelssohn, Composer

"Although I enjoyed writing Film Music, it was always a means to an end, in that it enabled me to keep a wife and family and write my classical music, which has always been my passion"

Malcolm Arnold, Composer

"I said to my friends that if I was going to starve, I might as well starve where the food is good"

Virgil Thomson, Composer

"Friendships that have stood the test of time and change are surely best"

Joseph Parry, Composer

"The thing about influence is that any composer worth anything will give you the same names"

Harrison Birtwistle, Composer

"I know already the music I will write. But the words? I have not yet decided"

Gyorgy Ligeti, Composer

"I look at you and I write down what I hear"

Virgil Thomson, Composer

"I don't care what other critics say, I only hope to be played"

Virgil Thomson, Composer

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