Composers Quotes

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

Composers are always going back to the past.

Many composers today don't know what the human throat is.

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.

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.

Composers love to write for symphony orchestras because the symphony is the Rolls Royce of musical instruments.

Pianists call me a composer, composers call me a pianist. The classicists think me a futurist, and the futurists call me a reactionary.

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.

Music is a continuum and the modern and avant-garde composers of today will be part of the standard repertoire 30 years from now.

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.

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

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.

I was not influenced by composers as much as by natural objects and physical phenomena.

Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries.

Let us not forget that the greatest composers were also the greatest thieves. They stole from everyone and everywhere.

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.

Composers shouldn't think too much - it interferes with their plagiarism.

Composers are not all good conductors.

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.

My favorite instrument is the snare drum. In Scotland, the snare drum is very prominent in Highland bands. The Scottish style of playing is in my blood. It's a very powerful instrument, but it can also be soothing, like velvet. It's a real challenge for composers.

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.

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.

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.

I have tremendous respect for film composers.

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.

In Hollywood, the rainbow hits the ground for composers.

Jazz has been such a force in music, that any musician, including classical composers, have been influenced, and obviously performers, also.