Composers Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.