Famous quotes by Composers

"The new limitations are the human ones of perception"

Milton Babbitt, Composer

"Music should be able to invoke the natural emotions in all human beings. Music is not notes fixed on apiece of paper"

Toru Takemitsu, Composer

"In Evita, I wasn't really hugely involved with it. I gave a little bit of help, but they needed a bit of technical help on the movie, and so some of my music people went in at the end of the movie and helped out with it"

Andrew Lloyd Webber, Composer

"You may have the universe, if I may have Italy"

Giuseppe Verdi, Composer

"It's really the sound of the voices, the sound of the words, the sound of the sound that we're interested in"

Anne Dudley, Composer

"I owe very, very much to Mozart; and if one studies, for instance, the way in which I write for string quartet, then one cannot deny that I have learned this directly from Mozart. And I am proud of it!"

Arnold Schoenberg, Composer

"It is never right to play ragtime fast"

Scott Joplin, Composer

"Respectable people do not write music or make love as a career"

Alexander Borodin, Composer

"Esquire, in a July 1957 issue, has a photograph of me playing the French horn at the Five Spot"

David Amram, Composer

"The Olympics are a wonderful metaphor for world cooperation, the kind of international competition that's wholesome and healthy, an interplay between countries that represents the best in all of us"

John Williams, Composer

"I think I came across Cecil Taylor a bit later, in 65 or 66. That really impressed me - Cecil Taylor is an amazing character... Both his music and the way he approaches the instrument are astonishing"

Luc Ferrari, Composer

"Every great inspiration is but an experiment"

Charles Ives, Composer

"Genius is an overused word. The world has known only about a half dozen geniuses. I got only fairly near"

Fritz Kreisler, Composer

"Jazz is not the popular culture. Jazz is in the same position in our culture as classical music. A very small minority of people really love it"

John Corigliano, Composer

"So little time and so little to do"

Oscar Levant, Composer

"A politician is a man who will double cross that bridge when he comes to it"

Oscar Levant, Composer

"Happiness isn't something you experience; it's something you remember"

Oscar Levant, Composer

"Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you'll find the real tinsel underneath"

Oscar Levant, Composer

"I have no trouble with y enemies. But my God damn friends... they are the ones that keep me walking the floors at night"

Oscar Levant, Composer

"I think a lot of Bernstein - but not as much as he does"

Oscar Levant, Composer

"The attraction of the virtuoso for the public is very like that of the circus for the crowd. There is always the hope that something dangerous will happen"

Claude Debussy, Composer

"Some people wish above all to conform to the rules, I wish only to render what I can hear. There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law"

Claude Debussy, Composer

"How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling?"

Claude Debussy, Composer

"A beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn"

Claude Debussy, Composer

"The principle of the endless melody is the perpetual becoming of a music that never had any reason for starting, any more than it has any reason for ending"

Igor Stravinsky, Composer

"Music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time"

Igor Stravinsky, Composer

"I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the variety of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust"

Igor Stravinsky, Composer

"I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge"

Igor Stravinsky, Composer

"Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end"

Igor Stravinsky, Composer

"When you know your cast well and their strengths and weaknesses, you can start writing for them, just the way Shakespeare wrote for his actors"

Stephen Sondheim, Composer

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