Composer Quotes

If I belong to a tradition, it is a tradition that makes the masterpiece tell the performer what to do, and not the performer telling the piece what it should be like, or the composer what he ought to have composed.

The negative is the equivalent of the composer's score, and the print the performance.

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?

To judge a composer's work, one must consider it as a whole.

Other, far fewer, directors are more like the composer - conceptualizing the piece, scoring it, distributing its musical lines among a range of registers, chords, and instruments.

The thing about influence is that any composer worth anything will give you the same names.

I began my career with infantile dreams of becoming a composer.

I don't think a guy that really has no understanding about people, or has no interest in understanding people would make a good film composer.

It doesn't necessarily mean at all that the composer plays his own works best.

I feel very free and very happy to be a composer.

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.

Pianists call me a composer, composers call me a pianist. The classicists think me a futurist, and the futurists call me a reactionary.

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.

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.

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.

Any subject is good for opera if the composer feels it so intently he must sing it out.

If I weren't a director, I would want to be a film composer.

A nation creates music - the composer only arranges it.

It's nice to have a great female composer in the program and add her color.

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.

Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Well, let me, first of all, say, that as a microtonal composer, I've never been much of a theorist.

If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.

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.

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.

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.