Famous quotes by Composers

"If you write songs, you have an idea how they're going to sound"

Fred Frith, Composer

"And so many of the kinds of labels you get stuck with don't really tell the story; Progressive, Art Rock, Noise Music, Downtown - it ends up being a struggle to stay out of debates that other people are having around you"

Fred Frith, Composer

"The retrospective glance is a relatively easy gesture for us to make"

George Crumb, Composer

"Nonetheless, I sense that it will be the task of the future to somehow synthesize the sheer diversity of our present resources into a more organic and well-ordered procedure"

George Crumb, Composer

"Most of my influences are turn-of-the-century"

George Crumb, Composer

"Art means to dare - and to have been right"

Ned Rorem, Composer

"There's no way I can compete with someone who can write rap or rock and roll. Nor do I wish to. But I've always kept up to date with music changes. I worked very hard not to type myself"

Elmer Bernstein, Composer

"I thought in terms of the enthusiasm of doing it. I didn't think about whether I was ready"

Elmer Bernstein, Composer

"I did 10 years of comedies and 10 years of Westerns. I really like to stay away from car chases. I prefer the more intimate film. You have a much more direct association with the emotions"

Elmer Bernstein, Composer

"The idea in The Man that Would Be King was that the music should recreate all that majestic surrounding, and emphasize the adventure, but also speak about the frustration, or, rather said, the curse of both protagonists, even before happened what happens them"

Maurice Jarre, Composer

"For Ryan's Daughter, I used a total of eight harps, something that was, at least, weird"

Maurice Jarre, Composer

"Most gentlemen don't like love, they just like to kick it around"

Cole Porter, Composer

"In olden days, a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking, but now, God knows, anything goes"

Cole Porter, Composer

"I love Paris in the summer, when it sizzles"

Cole Porter, Composer

"If nothing is at risk, nothing is established"

Brian Ferneyhough, Composer

"Certainly being in California has encouraged a sustained commitment to rethinking the nature, purposes, and relevance of the contemporary arts, specifically music, for a society which by and large seems to manage quite well without them"

Brian Ferneyhough, Composer

"By reason of weird translation, many such sets of instructions read like poems anyhow"

Brian Ferneyhough, Composer

"The development of new instrumental and vocal idioms has been one of the remarkable phenomena of recent music"

George Crumb, Composer

"Perhaps two million years ago, the creatures of a planet in some remote galaxy faced a musical crisis similar to that which we earthly composers face today"

George Crumb, Composer

"In a broader sense, the rhythms of nature, large and small - the sounds of wind and water, the sounds of birds and insects - must inevitably find their analogues in music"

George Crumb, Composer

"I have observed, too, that the people of the many countries that I have visited are showing an ever increasing interest in the classical and traditional music of their own cultures"

George Crumb, Composer

"I am optimistic about the future of music"

George Crumb, Composer

"Although technical discussions are interesting to composers, I suspect that the truly magical and spiritual powers of music arise from deeper levels of our psyche"

George Crumb, Composer

"Nowadays, if a studio assumes that his film is bad, there is always an executive that gets more nervous than usual and thinks that if they change the music, the film will become a masterpiece"

Maurice Jarre, Composer

"My students frequently ask what their next project should be. My advice: immerse yourself in the music you love and you will find what you want to do; you will discover your next project"

Lukas Foss, Composer

"Mozart wrote so many works in his thirty-five years that it would take a lifetime just to write out the notes. We literally do not know how he did it"

Lukas Foss, Composer

"Most artists have experienced the creative block. We get stuck in our work. We beat our head against the wall: nothing. Sometimes, it is because we are trying something at the wrong time?"

Lukas Foss, Composer

"There is another interesting paradox here: by immersing ourselves in what we love, we find ourselves. We do not lose ourselves. One does not lose one's identity by falling in love"

Lukas Foss, Composer

"In the nineteenth century the more grandiose word, inspiration, began to replace the word, idea, in the arts"

Lukas Foss, Composer

"I don't dare postulate about science, but I know that it takes both emotion and intellect in order for art to happen"

Lukas Foss, Composer

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