Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
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.
Take a play that you like but you think is flawed, and see if you can improve it and turn it into a musical. [...] Then make up your own story.
The earth moves in a certain rhythm, a certain sound, a certain note. When the music stops the earth will stop and everything upon it will die.
I basically love classical music. I love a lot of musicians playing together and the whole culture of that, whether it's Indian or it's Western.
Where I have come unstuck sometimes has mostly been to do with the stories not being quite right or not connecting with a contemporary audience.
But music, don't you know, is a dream from which the veils have been lifted. It's not even the expression of a feeling, it's the feeling itself.
All talk of method and style seemed suddenly trivial; I became interested in meaning. I wanted to say something musically about life and living.
I can't write music unless I'm deeply connected to it and that connection almost always comes from some experience that I have had or am having.
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.
I deny that either singers or conductors can "create" or work creatively - this, as I have always said, is a conception that leads to the abyss.
There are times when I feel uninspired and I don't want to compose. I call these my 'bewitched' periods. I have to be touched with a magic wand.
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.
From childhood I was passionately fond of music and wanted to be a musician. I have no recollection of any real desire ever to be anything else.
On your birthday today, don't Look up 'Life Expectancy' coz I suspect As you've reached 60, you want to be happy, Trust me, you'll be depressed.
Traditional methods for falling asleep work. Non-taxing, repetitive mental tasks have a lulling effect, and I built those patterns into 'Sleep'.
Luke Cage is seen in 'Jessica Jones,' but he doesn't really come into his own until the 'Luke Cage' series. That's when you really see who he is.
One performer whose band played my music better than I could myself was Art Farmer. He recorded 'Sing Me Softly of the Blues' and 'Ad Infinitum'.
Selfishness can be a virtue. Selfishness is essential to survival, and without survival we cannot protect those whom we love more than ourselves.
What happens in our consciousness and minds and bodies is also happening on earth. The more we pollute the earth, for example, the sicker we are.
I conclude that the Wagnerian operas which are already in the repertoire, and other masterworks as well, stand in no further need of my services.
I'm working, but there is so much still to be done! And it frightens me to think of my weight of years. But on we go, without fear or hesitation!
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.
I like to read. I've become obsessed with fiction. And it's too bad: I'm a musician many people love and I myself am not part of the music scene.
I dream of a collaboration that would finally be total, in which the librettist would often think as a composer and the composer as a librettist.
Those are miracles that no merely human brain can work. The artist is merely the sound conduct of a Force that dictates to him what he should do.
My hope is that the music creates a strange, beautiful, overwhelming - sometimes even frightening - landscape, and invites you to get lost in it.
Dance as though no one is watching. Love as though you've never been hurt. Sing as though no one can hear you. Live as though heaven is on earth.
The music you love when you're a teenager is always going to be the most important to you, and I find that it's all over the score of 'Hamilton.'
We get more dangerous as we accumulate knowledge, and that's both a sadness and something to control, try to learn to live with, make terms with.
All the people with whom I was very close at one point in my life - Stockhausen, Berio, Ligeti, Nono, Bernd Alois Zimmermann - they are all gone.
To be a good improviser, you have to study composition as a parallel. Because what improvisation is, on a high level, is spontaneous composition.
I almost never these days sit down with a CD or my laptop and just listen to a piece with a score. I probably would do that while I'm exercising.
Every composer's music reflects in its subject-matter and in its style the source of the money the composer is living on while writing the music.
If my life is not crazy and complicated, then something's wrong. I'm happiest when it is, and the fact of the matter is, it's what keeps me fresh.
I'm Iranian and no matter what I do, I'm dealing with politics because especially my music, that it's a music that talks about peace, love, unity.
People say my music is English. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's not me writing English music, but that English music is becoming more like me.
Writing for TV or films isn't great art. You have to have a common denominator. It's up to the composer to make that common denominator memorable.
Music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time.
You know, the ukulele itself is not a very loud instrument, all right? And, you know, compared to like a trumpet, right? A trumpet is really loud.
How lucky is the man who, like Mozart and others, goes to the tavern of an evening and writes some fresh music. For he lives while he is creating.
All I know about method is that when I am not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I am working, it is quite clear I know nothing.
You read about somebody, and it doesn't really matter whether or not they really exist - the point is that you get into them like real characters.
No friend have I. I must live by myself alone; but I know well that God is nearer to me than others in my art, so I will walk fearlessly with Him.
To me it's like, every time I'm a director, like today, you're the captain of the ship, so you better dress like it. You're the host of the party.
I'm thinking of the audience as being ambient, meaning not sitting focused but being in the space and exploring it while listening to the players.
For once you are going to hear a dream, a dream that I have made sound... I dreamed all this; never could my poor head have invented such a thing.
I was a mathematician by nature, and still am - I just knew I didn't want to be a mathematician. So I decided not to take any mathematics courses.
Because we weren't having success finding a CEO, our investors insisted that we hire these managers a temporary CEO and CFO. That didn't go great.
Where the Tennessee River, like a silver snake, winds her way through the clay hills of Alabama, sits high on these hills, my home town, Florence.
Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.