Composer Quotes

I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.

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.

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.

Americans can pretty much sing anything, whereas foreign singers are often limited in style, language, even composer.

I've had those people very interested in my writing. Since I think of myself as a composer, I feel really good. I've had lots of guys call me up. I've gotten two or three commissions to write things. I've written lots of movie scores.

I shall always respect the composer. If I embellish, it is his idea I am embellishing.

If you only do little clusters - three or four songs by one, and another, and then yet another - you lose the opportunity to think your way into the composer's mind, since, after all, most of these pieces are quite brief.

There's still a lot I need to do as a player, as a musician, as a sound creator. I have commissioned 170 pieces: that's still not enough, there are still lots and lots of composers I would like to approach. When I see a composer and I see a performer, I think to combine those forces.

I find respect for a mediocre British composer, as opposed to a really good American, ridiculous because they automatically respect a composer if he's from England.

Remember always that the composer's pen is still mightier than the bow of the violinist; in you lie all the possibilities of the creation of beauty.

I can think and play stuff in classical music that possibly violinists who didn't have access to other types of music could never do. It means I'm more flexible within classical music, to be a servant to the composer.

I am but an architectural 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.

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.

There is no doubt that the first requirement for a composer is to be dead.

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.

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.

You become a great composer when you win a Pulitzer. But I think that now it's a completely meaningless award.

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.

I am a composer, horn player, and computer programmer.

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.

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.

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.

The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.

A nation creates music - the composer only arranges it.