Composers Quotes
Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules... Mathematicians are more like classical composers.
Brian Greene
I was always drawn to Broadway musicals, and obviously composers like Gershwin, Rodgers, Berlin and Porter were writing music that I found wildly impressive.
Marvin Hamlisch
The first year I started in San Francisco, there was an American work on every program and there's been a lot of music by living composers and gradually that was part of the process of getting the audience really to trust me.
Michael Tilson Thomas
All of these people kept on being professional musicians and composers in the strictest sense.
James Tenney
We teach young kids from 8 to 14 or 15 about their musical heritage through great songs written by American songwriters. We don't do too many modern composers, although we include songs from Billy Joel and other writers like him.
Margaret Whiting
A characteristic of older folksongs, in most cases, is that we don't know their composers or authors. Older folksongs were written often with no commercial purpose in mind. They were passed down by word of mouth, from generation to generation.
Tom Glazer
Nobody can give a good performance unless the authors and composers have written a good part, a fact which is often overlooked.
Judy Holliday
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
I loved Hendrix. I mean, really, really loved him. As if he were one of the great classical composers. And he was. That's how I saw him.
Warren Zevon
Music is a continuum and the modern and avant-garde composers of today will be part of the standard repertoire 30 years from now.
Neville Marriner
Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries.
Brian Ferneyhough
Let us not forget that the greatest composers were also the greatest thieves. They stole from everyone and everywhere.
Pablo Casals
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.
Evelyn Glennie
So many of the sounds that contemporary composers were trying to create were to be found in the traditional musics of the world. That was encouraging but also little daunting to think that you had to work so hard to be new and yet it was old.
Robert Morris
Composers love to write for symphony orchestras because the symphony is the Rolls Royce of musical instruments.
David Del Tredici
It's amazing how fast generations lose sight of other generations. One of the first things the young composers who come to work with me say is that they want to write music people will like, instead of gaining their credentials by being rejected by the audience.
Carlisle Floyd
When the Domaine Musical started up, I wasn't part of it. They were the major players in contemporary music at that time, braodcasting old and new composers' work. And I wasn't one of them.
Luc Ferrari
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
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 think the thing's that perhaps sad really is that younger people haven't come in and I think it must have been absolutely fantastic to have worked in the 50's when you had all of the great Broadway composers and when West Side Story didn't win the Tony Award.
Andrew Lloyd Webber
The composers could no longer direct all performances in person, and so the responsibility of interpreting their works in the spirit in which they had been conceived was placed upon conductors.
Anton Seidl
Composers today get a TV script on Friday and have to record on Tuesday. It's just dreadful to impose on gifted talent and expect decent music under these conditions.
Alex North
But still as compared to many, many orchestras in the world, I think you find a lot more new music and living composers on our programs than many other places.
Michael Tilson Thomas
I was not influenced by composers as much as by natural objects and physical phenomena.
Edgard Varese