Famous quotes by Composers

"My intention here is to make it clear that not a single cell of my composition, here in regard to The Raven, is found by chance or intuition, that the composition moved towards perfection with the precision and inevitability of a mathematical equation"

Maurice Ravel, Composer

"I did my work slowly, drop by drop. I tore it out of me by pieces"

Maurice Ravel, Composer

"A musicologist is a man who can read music but can't hear it"

Thomas Beecham, Composer

"As everyone else, I was a fan of Pink Floyd in the Sixties"

Klaus Schulze, Composer

"I come from a background of experimental music which mingled real sounds together with musical sounds"

Ennio Morricone, Composer

"Bernard Herrmann used to write all his scores by himself. So did Bach, Beethoven and Stravinsky. I don't understand why this happens in the movie industry"

Ennio Morricone, Composer

"Since I started composing I have always worked with series of tempos, even superimposed the music of different groups of musicians, of singers, instrumentalists who play and sing in different tempos simultaneously and then meet every now and then in the same tempo"

Karlheinz Stockhausen, Composer

"All the arts in America are a gigantic racket run by unscrupulous men for unhealthy women"

Thomas Beecham, Composer

"And I'll never forget the first time I took the possibility to project sound every day for six or seven hours with special devices which were built for me"

Karlheinz Stockhausen, Composer

"And harmony means that the relationship between all the elements used in a composition is balanced, is good"

Karlheinz Stockhausen, Composer

"I became aware that all sounds can make meaningful language"

Karlheinz Stockhausen, Composer

"I think recordings have been a terrific advance because now, when you have a piece of music, particularly something that appears to the listener very complicated, there's really a push to the world to try to figure out what it was that he was hearing"

Leo Ornstein, Composer

"Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra - not choreography to the audience"

George Szell, Composer

"I'd met Dr Dre, he was thinking about his next album, we talked a little and he said, 'Let me give you some of these loops and see what you come up with'"

Burt Bacharach, Composer

"My favorite work is The Full Monty because I got an Oscar for it. But it was really hard work at the time. Sometimes comedy is not a bundle of laughs to actually do"

Anne Dudley, Composer

"Two years ago I hadn't even thought of the Woman in White, and I was doing a television show and I said I hadn't found a story and the next day somebody rang me and said, "Have you ever thought of the Woman in White""

Andrew Lloyd Webber, Composer

"Music is a form of prayer"

Toru Takemitsu, Composer

"A melody is not merely something you can hum"

Aaron Copland, Composer

"I adore art... When I am alone with my notes, my heart pounds and the tears stream from my eyes, and my emotion and my joys are too much to bear"

Giuseppe Verdi, Composer

"To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable"

Aaron Copland, Composer

"So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning"

Aaron Copland, Composer

"I never was very capable of expressing my feelings or emotions in words. I don't know whether this is the cause why I did it in music and also why I did it in painting. Or vice versa: That I had this way as an outlet. I could renounce expressing something in words"

Arnold Schoenberg, Composer

"I travel the world, and I'm happy to say that America is still the great melting pot - maybe a chunky stew rather than a melting pot at this point, but you know what I mean"

Philip Glass, Composer

"What came to me as a revelation was the use of rhythm in developing an overall structure in music"

Philip Glass, Composer

"I cannot conceive of music that expresses absolutely nothing"

Bela Bartok, Composer

"People often complain that music is too ambiguous, that what they should think when they hear it is so unclear, whereas everyone understands words. With me, it is exactly the opposite, and not only with regard to an entire speech but also with individual words"

Felix Mendelssohn, Composer

"My operas and my theatre works are very formal pieces"

Harrison Birtwistle, Composer

"Music is at once the product of feeling and knowledge, for it requires from its disciples, composers and performers alike, not only talent and enthusiasm, but also that knowledge and perception which are the result of protracted study and reflection"

Alban Berg, Composer

"I guess all songs is folk songs. I never heard no horse sing 'em"

Big Bill Broonzy, Composer

"Reviewing music or reviewing anything is a writing job. It's nice if you are experienced in the field you are writing about, but writing is what you are doing"

Virgil Thomson, Composer

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