Composer Quotes

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.

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.

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 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.

Intelligent analysis of the composer's intention and strict adherence to it automatically ensures sincerity.

It's not a special taste. An American composer should have something to say to a cab driver.

I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.

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.

Any composer who is gloriously conscious that he is a composer must believe that he receives his inspiration from a source higher than himself.

The further the music develops, the more complex the apparatus used by the composer to express his thoughts becomes.

Soon, I knew that I would become a chemist, rather than a composer.

The difference between the student and the born composer is he really hears the thing, and they have to stage it and manipulate it by technical equipment.

I think a composer is always interested in his last work.

It's understanding the intention of a composer that allows a producer and an arranger to make those moments speak.

I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.

I am writing something which I find satisfying and which I am prepared to put my name to as a composer.

Like any other composer of opera, I choose a subject not for polemical reasons, but because it contains vivid characters in highly charged dramatic situations.

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.

As I get older, I'm slowing down and, yes, calming down in my desire to be taken seriously. That I can be entertaining and funny and high nervous energy can work against me as a serious composer, slowly but surely you'll see me be quieter just so that people will listen.

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.

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.

I like a composer called Henry Purcell, and I love to listen to Neil Young.