Composer Quotes
I really liked doing a number of the projects and directors, and etc., etc., I knew about half-way through that I would never be doing that again. It's just not me. I really am happy as a part-time film composer, not a full-time film composer.
Danny Elfman
Pianists call me a composer, composers call me a pianist. The classicists think me a futurist, and the futurists call me a reactionary.
Anton Rubinstein
I think the composer and production staff of an opera have a real responsibility to use visual elements of all kinds to make clear to the American audience, at any rate, exactly what is going on.
John Eaton
The great opera composers were so good at their job, that the whole genre came to be built around the concept of the composer's vision.
Stewart Copeland
I dare suggest that the composer would do himself and his music an immediate and eventual service by total, resolute and voluntary withdrawal from this public world to one of private performance and electronic media.
Milton Babbitt
It's hard to decide how to match words to music. It's not like it's twice the work. It's always difficult for me to explain to the composer what I'm looking for. I'm not a professional; I lack even basic knowledge about writing music.
Ayumi Hamasaki
Any subject is good for opera if the composer feels it so intently he must sing it out.
Gian Carlo Menotti
I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First to discourage the composer from writing any more and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven.
Jascha Heifetz
Well, let me, first of all, say, that as a microtonal composer, I've never been much of a theorist.
John Eaton
If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.
Gustav Mahler
Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.
Hector Berlioz
The real composer thinks about his work the whole time; he is not always conscious of this, but he is aware of it later when he suddenly knows what he will do.
Igor Stravinsky
I've come up with another formulation about style: that it's essentially a manifestation of a certain habitual set of limitations. It's what a composer does NOT do that defines a style.
James Tenney
You'll know if you're a famous composer if 20 years from now your name appears on a pull-down menu in Band in a Box, alongside Hans Zimmer.
Cliff Martinez
I think Bach is equally a romantic composer because he laid the seeds harmonically for people like Chopin and the great Romantics, Brahms, so it's difficult to you know all this like labelling and putting - I think Bach is attractive to musicians because he supersedes the labels.
Nigel Kennedy
Intelligent analysis of the composer's intention and strict adherence to it automatically ensures sincerity.
Kate Smith
It's not a special taste. An American composer should have something to say to a cab driver.
Morton Gould
I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.
Leonard Bernstein
Which is why, in my lieder concerts, I always strove, when possible, to sing only the works of a single composer, so that the audience could be gradually drawn into a particular creative genius' way of thinking, and could follow him.
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau
To me, all writing is like music. And especially dialogue. I studied music in college; that is what I wanted to be, a composer. Acting got me sidetracked.
Dirk Benedict
I think it's good for the composer to teach because you always have new students and you have to begin at the beginning and make things clear.
John Corigliano
Any composer who is gloriously conscious that he is a composer must believe that he receives his inspiration from a source higher than himself.
John Philip Sousa