Famous quotes by Composers

"I'm generally pessimistic about the dumbing down of America - especially with summer movies"

Elmer Bernstein, Composer

"I would do the occasional score. I thought it was the most thrilling thing. It was instant. You made the music and they played it right away to millions of people. I found it thrilling"

Elmer Bernstein, Composer

"Well, I think music for kids is never anything but experimental, is it?"

Fred Frith, Composer

"We play melodic music, we play songs, we play all kinds of things, and when you improvise you don't just shut out different languages, you use all the languages that you have"

Fred Frith, Composer

"There would seem to be a limit, even for an art preoccupied with boundaries and transgressions, beyond which a work reaches its breaking point and becomes an actual failure, a mere experimentation"

Brian Ferneyhough, Composer

"The past nine years in San Diego have represented such a period of questioning"

Brian Ferneyhough, Composer

"My own position is, that it is largely up to the work itself to suggest the nature of these referential points without dimensions in and through the processes by which the distance between them is maintained"

Brian Ferneyhough, Composer

"In my own recent String Trio I attempt to superimpose two quite different sets of formal strategies, both of which, ultimately, refer back to historical precedent"

Brian Ferneyhough, Composer

"I suppose that the scope and implications of such forces have rendered my personal accounting ritual pretty much obsolete. That's how things sometimes go"

Brian Ferneyhough, Composer

"The record company started as an adjunct to that, to give young composers their first recorded performances; to give young musicians their first debut on a recording. These are all things that big record companies would never touch because there is no money in it!"

Gunther Schuller, Composer

"As rich as Cincinnati was in live music, New York was even more"

Gunther Schuller, Composer

"And it is this sense that some of us have to contribute to the culture, to the society in ways that may hurt financially, so what? We do it because we are born to do it, we feel we have no other choice and so be it"

Gunther Schuller, Composer

""Victor Young had been hired to write the score for the dances of The Ten Commandments, but he became very ill. You were then hired to write the score. But at the same time you'd written The Man with the Golden Arm score"

Elmer Bernstein, Composer

"There's an awful lot of resources that can be drawn upon in an improvised music concert"

Fred Frith, Composer

"There are always things to examine. What's great is not feeling that I have to refuse any of them. Maybe, no good from a PR perspective, but from the point of view of everyday life, it keeps things interesting"

Fred Frith, Composer

"Some things don't wind up sounding like you'd expect, which is just as well"

Fred Frith, Composer

"Not necessarily in one concert, but they're all there to be used if you want to use them"

Fred Frith, Composer

"It's like learning a language; you can't speak a language fluently until you find out who you are in that language, and that has as much to do with your body as it does with vocabulary and grammar"

Fred Frith, Composer

"I think things changed as a result of a certain perception of our politics. When we went through our zealous, self-righteous period, it didn't exactly win us any friends"

Fred Frith, Composer

"I think that one of the things that influences me most as a composer is to what extent I can deconstruct and reconstruct the material that I'm working with"

Fred Frith, Composer

"My sole inspiration is a telephone call from a director"

Cole Porter, Composer

"What makes a specific quality or quantity of innovation retain its intense newness over the years?"

Brian Ferneyhough, Composer

"In my model, important interference phenomena arise when individual strata come into contact. These chaotic fluctuations are, I suppose, what my music is really 'about.'"

Brian Ferneyhough, Composer

"I don't see 'lines of force' as being destructive, except to the extent that they are exclusively traceable through observance of the path of distorted material left in their wake"

Brian Ferneyhough, Composer

"All the world loves a clown"

Cole Porter, Composer

"This was possible only by dint of extended periods of frequently quite painful reflection and digestion"

Brian Ferneyhough, Composer

"The idea of 'machine assemblage' is, especially, very alien to my sensibility, since it suggests a relative indifference of the strata to one another during the process of construction"

Brian Ferneyhough, Composer

"As a necessary prerequisite to the creation of new forms of expression, one might, I suppose, argue that current sensibilities respond uniquely to the notion of exhaustion as exhaustion, although that does de facto seem rather limiting"

Brian Ferneyhough, Composer

"So now, thirty years, forty years later, I mean, I could find a whole orchestra of a thousand to put these things together in New York City alone. In those days, if I could scrape up twenty musicians to do this, it was something extraordinary"

Gunther Schuller, Composer

"Improvised music involves a lot of intuition and I like developing intuition"

Fred Frith, Composer

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