Composer Quotes

The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working.

My dream was always to be a composer, but fashion came very easily.

So, it becomes an exercise in futility if you write something that does not express the film as the director wishes. It's still their ball game. It's their show. I think any successful composer learns how to dance around the director's impulses.

Aaron Copland was a man that had a very specific point of view about what music should be which was that, he felt that new music should have the composer should show a personality in his music.

I probably belong to a type of composer of songs who keeps thinking about melody... I am old fashioned.

If a composer has a nice wife and some nice children, how can he let the children starve on his dissonances?

The old idea of a composer suddenly having a terrific idea and sitting up all night to write it is nonsense. Nighttime is for sleeping.

The opportunities of man are limited only by his imagination. But so few have imagination that there are ten thousand fiddlers to one composer.

A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.

Wagner is a composer who has beautiful moments but awful quarter hours.

We consider Monteverdi the first composer of opera. There was someone before, but everything started with Monteverdi.

A composer knows that music is written by human beings for human beings and that music is a continuation of life, not something separated from it.

I just have to take my chances like any other composer.

My main concern is if this composer has been made aware of the fact that I've come clean in all of my cases. I killed in pure hate, robbing along the way. So if this person hasn't, then I'd sure appreciate it if someone would inform him or her of it.

I am not so complicated or intelligent a composer, nor am I very interested in becoming so. I am much more happy doing what I know I can do than what I am not sure I could do.

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.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

You have to face the fact that I have no reputation as a composer; I have my reputation as a songwriter and a performer-and that opportunity came this summer, when I was invited to perform at the Lincoln Centre festival in New York... three nights.

My husband is a composer, so he plays piano all the time and I sit there and clap telling my unborn child, 'Hear me clap, hear the music.' I know music, in general, is supposed to be good for babies to hear.

I'm glad I won it because when I grew up the Pulitzer was the award that every composer wanted and I was like that too.

Yes, Carl Vine stuck around. He's now number one composer for choreography.