Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Like many composers, most of my compositions are influenced by the music I've listened to throughout my life.
My mother, Minuetta Kessler, was a concert pianist and composer who performed at Carnegie Hall and Town Hall.
I would prefer to listen to a French classical composer like Olivier Messiaen than to the pop hits of the day.
I guess, for better or for worse, I am an American composer, and I've had a wonderful life being exactly that.
In any case, Ives encouraged me to go into music even though he himself had such a hard time being a composer.
There are wonderful composers and librettists out there. It's the lack of creative producers that is troubling.
Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.
Communists love to make films about composers, because composers compose music and don't talk subversive things.
Any composer should be able to synthesize the primary feelings that the characters are going through in the movie.
We consider Monteverdi the first composer of opera. There was someone before, but everything started with Monteverdi.
Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries.
I am probably the only composer in South India who has delivered many superhit songs but was not considered a success.
Chopin is a great composer who influenced many, many important composers. He was a great innovator, especially in harmony.
My mother played piano at home; she came from a musical family. Her father, who I never met, was a conductor and composer.
If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.
composition is notation of distortion of what composers think they've heard before. Masterpieces are marvelous misquotations.
Nobody can give a good performance unless the authors and composers have written a good part, a fact which is often overlooked.
Beethoven's reputation is based entirely on gossip. The middle Beethoven represents a supreme example of a composer on an ego trip.
Pianists call me a composer, composers call me a pianist. The classicists think me a futurist, and the futurists call me a reactionary.
Sidney Poitier and Sidney Lumet were instrumental in helping me get started as the first black composer to get name credit for movie scores.
I cannot listen to Beethoven or Mahler or Chopin or Bach when I write because those composers require you stop what you are doing and listen.
A lot of composers before me have been on this mission to change the world by getting off equal temperament, and I'm definitely one of those.
Of all composers, past and present, I am the least learned. I mean that in all seriousness, and by learning I do not mean knowledge of music.
A composer's a pretty lonely life. When people talk about premieres and movie star - no. We sit in a dark room and spend a lot of time alone.
To be a great composer requires immense experience... One acquires this by listening not only to other men's work, but above all to one's own!
The opportunities of man are limited only by his imagination. But so few have imagination that there are ten thousand fiddlers to one composer.
I'm trying to interpret the film through the director's head, but it all comes out through me. So, a composer is kind of like a psychic medium.
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.
Both costume and fashion are about telling a story, except that in a ballet the story has already been written by the composer or the librettist.
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.
A large part of my work has been collaborating with composers; I think we've commissioned about 140 pieces now, a lot of them percussion concertos.
I wanted to be a composer before anything else. And my sister was listening to Led Zeppelin in the other room! When I heard that, it was a game-changer.
Asking the author of historical novels to teach you about history is like expecting the composer of a melody to provide answers about radio transmission.
That is basically me, and although I have done many things in my life - conducting, playing piano, and so on - what is fundamental is my being a composer.
I think there's a time as a writer when you want to see the best things in life, and you go out wherever you go with your dreams as a writer or a composer.
I think that one of the things that influences me most as a composer is to what extent I can deconstruct and reconstruct the material that I'm working with.
If you aim at anything lower that is expecting your audience to be really alert and aware, then you're going to be caught out sooner or later as a composer.
A lot of what a composer does has to do with storytelling, and there are different ways of fusing music with picture to express different storytelling ideas.
There are some composers - at the head of whom stands Beethoven - who not only do not know when to stop but appear to stop many times before they actually do.
With Hitchcock I had little relationship. I was called to replace Bernard Herrmann, his favorite composer, in Torn Curtain, after the bitter fight between them.
Mozart for me is the No. 1 composer. His music is not just joy or sadness. It's deep emotion with a touch of lightness, which is the most difficult thing to do.
That is the way a great master carpenter feels, or an architect or composer or anyone who creates anything - people want to be appreciated for what they have done.
The most ironic thing is my grandfather has his masters in music composition; he was a jazz composer. My dad was a musician, too. He played more, like, soul music.
You cannot enter a studio and just start crooning before the mike. It is essential to understand the mind of the composer, mood of the song, and meter of the tune.
I make me. At 18, I decided I wasn't going to have an unconstructed self ever. I was going to be the composer, the designer, the architect of me. It's been really fun.
I tried to score a few films with this composer Brian Reitzell here in L.A. We made a bunch of music we really loved, but we got fired from the film for being too weird.
I just scribbled away and eventually a C-major chord was there. I didn't ever decide I was going to be a composer. It was like being tall. It's what I was. It's what I did.
Why should the composer be more guilty than the poet who warms to fantasy by a strange flame, making an idea that inspires him the subject of his own very different treatment?
I think it's really the job of the composer, the artist, the painter, the writer to present people with options. I'm just really reflecting the thoughts and actions around me.
I have declared that I will work free of cost with those composers who are passionate about their work. Sohail Sen is one such lad, whose music in Banjaara has been liked a lot.