Samuel Barber Quotes

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  • Composer
  • 1910 - 1981
  • 12 quotes

Samuel Barber, a composer (1910 - 1981), is quoted 12 times on QuoteForever. The subjects that come up most often are Composer, Music, Audience and Difficult.

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There's no reason music should be difficult for an audience to understand.

How awful that the artist has become nothing but the after-dinner mint of society.

He is a lyric poet . . . aloof from the swirling currents in which many of his colleagues are immersed.

I was 7 years old when I began composing. I began composing, improvising at the piano, the usual story.

I guess, for better or for worse, I am an American composer, and I've had a wonderful life being exactly that.

I was supposed to be a doctor. I was supposed to go to Princeton. And everything I was supposed to do I didn't.

I can only say that I myself wrote always as I wished, without a tremendous desire to find the latest thing possible.

I was meant to be a composer and will be I'm sure. Don't ask me to try to forget this unpleasant thing and go play football - please.

I have always believed that I need a circumference of silence. As to what happens to when I composer, I really haven't the faintest idea.

I've had little success in intellectual circles. I'm not talked about in the 'New York Review of Books,' and I was never part of the Stravinsky 'inner circle.'

As for my own music, I've never written a book about it. I'm not pedagogical... When I write an abstract piano sonata or a concerto, I write what I feel. I'm not a self-conscious composer.

I think that what's been holding composers back a great deal is that they feel they must have a new style every year. This, in my case, would be hopeless. In fact, it is said that I have no style at all, but that doesn't matter. I just go on doing, as they say, my thing. I believe this takes a certain courage.

Samuel Barber is quoted on

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