Famous quotes by Composers

"What they can expect always is that they're going to be made to think"

Peter Maxwell Davies, Composer

"I'm very interested, for instance, in music in education - getting young people not only to listen to but participate in the music that I write. I consider this one of the most vital aspects of my work"

Peter Maxwell Davies, Composer

"I don't see how they can with most of my pieces, but I think it's unfortunate that they can, through familiarity with flashy performances of a great deal of other music"

Peter Maxwell Davies, Composer

"It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness, of pain, of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature and everlasting beauty of monotony"

Benjamin Britten, Composer

"An artist's sphere of influence is the world"

Carl Maria von Weber, Composer

"I like the variety. But basically my choice of films is a small intimate film. Quiet film, no action, just people in relationships. That's what I like the most"

Jerry Goldsmith, Composer

"What that book does for me is give me the tools in the same way that I had the tools when I learned the regular scales or the alphabet. If you give me the tools, the syntax, and the grammar, it still doesn't tell me how to write Ulysses"

David Baker, Composer

"In 1955 music wasn't that important. Music was a kind of a special thing you went and did"

Jerry Hunt, Composer

"This new art made a deep impression on me, and I began to study it ardently"

Ruggero Leoncavallo, Composer

"There's always a question of duration, there's a question of who the orchestra is. No one is free to write what you want - you collaborate on a film score, and one of the good things is that someone else's work is motivating you"

Michael Nyman, Composer

"The relation between practical and spiritual spheres in music is obvious, if only because it demands ears, finger, consciousness, and intellect"

Luciano Berio, Composer

"Let tyrants shake their iron rod"

William Billings, Composer

"In the first place, you must pay great attention to the key note"

William Billings, Composer

"There certainly is a lot of political pressure for states to adopt the new federal tax codes. But there is no law that requires them to do so"

John Barry, Composer

"This is something special. You can attempt to have a kind of non-living music"

Michael Tippett, Composer

"Music is a performing art, as any Native American will tell you. It isn't there in the score"

Michael Tippett, Composer

"Beethoven suppressed everything, his personal life disappeared until he was locked inside. That is a figure quite extreme"

Michael Tippett, Composer

"I have a bunch of albums I would love to get re-released"

Cy Coleman, Composer

"I am not facing the problem of emigration. I want my music to be acknowledged here first of all, in this country: after that, we shall see - perhaps the question will than become urgent"

Alfred Schnittke, Composer

"In all my years of performing, no audience member has ever actually assaulted me. I consider this to be the singular triumph of my performing career"

Rupert Holmes, Composer

"I've tried in my career to do most everything, because it all intrigues me. And I've found the first time I work in a new form, I discover all the things that make that an exciting medium. I've been very busy most of my career. I've had very few vacations"

Rupert Holmes, Composer

"No, it's a Bb. It looks wrong and it sounds wrong, but it's right"

Ralph Vaughan Williams, Composer

"What's wrong with sweetness and light? It's been around quite awhile"

Richard Rodgers, Composer

"Writing tonal music now you are not writing into the 19th century"

Gavin Bryars, Composer

"One thing I'm doing on the new Titanic recording is actually bringing in different acoustic spaces"

Gavin Bryars, Composer

"I remember once, when I started writing for the alto saxophone, a saxophonist told me to think of it as being like a cross between an oboe and a viola, but louder"

Gavin Bryars, Composer

"I have friends who have a CD mastering plant in Hollywood and they are very sceptical about European record labels' understanding of digital technology"

Gavin Bryars, Composer

"I currently spend a lot of time thinking about orchestration and every detail of a piece"

Gavin Bryars, Composer

"As I had collaborated with visual artists before, whether on installations, on performance pieces, in the context of theatre works, and as I had taught for a time in art colleges, the idea of writing music in response to painting was not alien"

Gavin Bryars, Composer

"Cage's Music of Changes was a further indication that the arts in general were beginning to consciously deal with the "given" material and, to varying degrees, liberating them from the inherited, functional concepts of control"

Earle Brown, Composer

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