Composers Quotes

I don't use composers. I research music the way I research the photographs or the facts in my scripts.

Composers, like authors, have a lot in common. Our main goal is to connect with the listener emotionally.

I began like all composers, writing for small groups. Chamber groups.

I would advise my young colleagues, the composers of symphonies, to drop in sometimes at the kindergarten, too. It is there that it is decided whether there will be anybody to understand their works in twenty years' time.

I am certain that most composers today would consider today's music to be rich, not to say confusing, in its enormous diversity of styles, technical procedures, and systems of esthetics.

Good writers are monotonous, like good composers. They keep trying to perfect the one problem they were born to understand.

I've heard though that there is a younger generation of tonal French composers who are reacting with vigour.

Composers should write tunes that chauffeurs and errand boys can whistle.

Other composers have taken this particular technique much further than I in the meantime, with the result that the Law of Diminishing Returns has begun to apply.

I feel that I belong to the 19th century. Some composers' music is very topical. It almost says, 'This is about what I read in newspapers yesterday.' Not mine.

We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.

Living composers writing for big band are very few and far between. There are not a lot of them, and I have a talent for doing it. I am zeroing in on what I do best.

Gifted women musicians and composers rarely received their due.

Many, many composers have only found their way to a certain form, through familiarizing themselves with texts.

When you have great songs that are going to live longer than the composers, everything you can do to bring those different elements and nuances out, serve the song.

I still the love classic period, but also the baroque period, and even 17th-Century music such as the music of Monteverdi. He's one of the greatest opera composers. He was the one who really started the opera.

The record company started as an adjunct to that, to give young composers their first recorded performances; to give young musicians their first debut on a recording. These are all things that big record companies would never touch because there is no money in it!

Sincere composers believe in God.

A large part of my work has been collaborating with composers; I think we've commissioned about 140 pieces now, a lot of them percussion concertos.

A hundred years ago, of course, the question that the German Composers' Co-operative asked itself sounded a lot more fundamental: How do you create a fair share for those who ensure that works can actually be performed at all?

Composers are the only people who can hear good music above bad sounds.

Composers are always going back to the past.

I was always drawn to Broadway musicals, and obviously composers like Gershwin, Rodgers, Berlin and Porter were writing music that I found wildly impressive.

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.

All of these people kept on being professional musicians and composers in the strictest sense.

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.

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.

Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules... Mathematicians are more like classical composers.

Still, American composers working in France have had a pretty hard time.

Well, the very best operas are the ones written by the very best composers.