Composer Quotes

I've been very fortunate as a composer to be involved with projects that have really propelled my scores forward. I'm very proud of it.

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

I believe that interpretation should be like a transparent glass, a window for the composer's music.

The public doesn't want new music; the main thing it demands of a composer is that he be dead.

I tend to listen to the classical composers: Rachmaninov, Satie.

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.

You can't have Bach, Mozart and Beethoven as your favorite composers. They simply define what music is!

The real composer thinks about his work the whole time; he is not always conscious of this, but he is aware of it later when he suddenly knows what he will do.

It is the power of music to carry one directly into the mental state of the composer.

The three greatest composers are Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. All the others are cretins.

The art of making films is a collaborative art. As a composer, you're always working with the cinematographer because he's so much the heart of the world they've created on film.

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

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

I continued to study Math and Physics on my own, but one and a half years later I realized that I did want to be a composer, and after that I never changed my mind.

I also had a brother who was like me a musician and a composer. A man of great talent, far more gifted than I. He died very young... he killed himself in the prime of his life.

The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.

I think it's really the job of the composer, the artist, the painter, the writer to present people with options. I'm just really reflecting the thoughts and actions around me.

Every composer's music reflects in its subject-matter and in its style the source of the money the composer is living on while writing the music.

It seems at times I should be a composer of sounds, not only of rhythms and colors. Walking under the trees, I felt as if the color made sound.

Remember always that the composer's pen is still mightier than the bow of the violinist; in you lie all the possibilities of the creation of beauty.

Composers combine notes, that's all.

The fact that certain composers have been able to create first-class music within the medium of film proves that film music can be as good as the composer is gifted.

The further the music develops, the more complex the apparatus used by the composer to express his thoughts becomes.

To judge a composer's work, one must consider it as a whole.

I couldn't say I ever dreamt of becoming a composer, a pianist, or anything else for that matter. I have the kind of brain where nothing is set in stone.

In Hollywood, the rainbow hits the ground for composers.

Why should the composer be more guilty than the poet who warms to fantasy by a strange flame, making an idea that inspires him the subject of his own very different treatment?

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.

With Hitchcock I had little relationship. I was called to replace Bernard Herrmann, his favorite composer, in Torn Curtain, after the bitter fight between them.

Today each composer is not only involved in aesthetics, but he's actually trying to create his own language.

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

composition is notation of distortion of what composers think they've heard before. Masterpieces are marvelous misquotations.

Rossini would have been a great composer if his teacher had spanked him enough on his backside.

I'm really grateful. But I never had the rock star dream. I thought it would be cool to be a modern-day composer.

Asking the author of historical novels to teach you about history is like expecting the composer of a melody to provide answers about radio transmission.

Music is at once the product of feeling and knowledge.

I love Philip Glass' work, not only as a film composer but also as a musician. The film score work that he does always amazes and shocks me.

If my serenade of song and story should serve as a pillow for some composer's head, as yet perhaps unborn, to dream and build on our fond melodies in his tomorrow, I have not labored in vain.

Im like any other composer. If you give me five years to write a symphony, Im still going to be asking for more time two days before its due.

Any composer who is gloriously conscious that he is a composer must believe that he receives his inspiration from a source higher than himself.

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

Composers are always going back to the past.

It doesn't necessarily mean at all that the composer plays his own works best.

The difference between the student and the born composer is he really hears the thing, and they have to stage it and manipulate it by technical equipment.

I'm not an intellectual composer.

I shall always respect the composer. If I embellish, it is his idea I am embellishing.

Intelligent analysis of the composer's intention and strict adherence to it automatically ensures sincerity.

Nobody can give a good performance unless the authors and composers have written a good part, a fact which is often overlooked.

If you're a good composer, you steal good steals.

You become a great composer when you win a Pulitzer. But I think that now it's a completely meaningless award.