Composer Quotes

Most of the important composers in our country are clustered in the Northeast.

John Barry was the first film composer I was aware of. As a teenager I owned several of his Bond soundtracks.

It is conceivable that what is unified form to the author or composer may of necessity be formless to his audience.

What do you think happens to a composer who is sincere and loves to write and has to wait thirty years to have someone play a piece of his music?

I like a composer called Henry Purcell, and I love to listen to Neil Young.

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

To me, all writing is like music. And especially dialogue. I studied music in college; that is what I wanted to be, a composer. Acting got me sidetracked.

I feel very free and very happy to be a composer.

A composer's job involves the decoration of fragments of time.

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

I am writing something which I find satisfying and which I am prepared to put my name to as a composer.

Any subject is good for opera if the composer feels it so intently he must sing it out.

I began my career with infantile dreams of becoming a composer.

I dream of a collaboration that would finally be total, in which the librettist would often think as a composer and the composer as a librettist.

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

I find respect for a mediocre British composer, as opposed to a really good American, ridiculous because they automatically respect a composer if he's from England.

I'm glad I won it because when I grew up the Pulitzer was the award that every composer wanted and I was like that too.

I think it's good for the composer to teach because you always have new students and you have to begin at the beginning and make things clear.

I listen only to Bach, Beethoven or Mozart. Life is too short to waste on other composers.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I'm not an intellectual composer.

Handel is the greatest composer that ever lived... I would uncover my head and kneel down on his tomb.

Americans can pretty much sing anything, whereas foreign singers are often limited in style, language, even composer.

It's understanding the intention of a composer that allows a producer and an arranger to make those moments speak

If you aim at anything lower that is expecting your audience to be really alert and aware, then you're going to be caught out sooner or later as a composer.

If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.

If I weren't a director, I would want to be a film composer.

I probably belong to a type of composer of songs who keeps thinking about melody... I am old fashioned.

The modern composer builds upon the foundation of truth.

Like any other composer of opera, I choose a subject not for polemical reasons, but because it contains vivid characters in highly charged dramatic situations.

I always wanted to be a spontaneous composer.

Not all, but too many of the best writers, composers, and artists of our time begin to be acclaimed only when they no longer have anything to say and take to performing instead of stating.

I have a team, the same team of filmmakers I worked with on 'Pi' and 'Requiem'. Which is my cameraman, and my composer, and my producer. We've all worked together for a number of films.

I've always been a composer dependent on texts.

Aaron Copland was a man that had a very specific point of view about what music should be which was that, he felt that new music should have the composer should show a personality in his music.

I think that one of the things that influences me most as a composer is to what extent I can deconstruct and reconstruct the material that I'm working with.

I think a composer is always interested in his last work.

The thing about influence is that any composer worth anything will give you the same names.

I'm not an architectural composer.

We are God’s gift to each other. Like a master composer, He brings all the instruments together, each with a different tone, each playing a different part, and He makes it turn out so beautifully.

I am a ham. I've no business being rock 'n' roll. I've said it over and over again that I'm a classical composer, dishevelling my personality by dabbling in rock 'n' roll.

It is hard to think of another composer who so perfectly marries form and passion.

[Patrick Leonard] is such a magnificent composer. I don't think there is anybody working today with those kind of skills that could translate one of my tunes into that really beautiful chamber music.

Trombone virtuoso and innovative composer, Papo combines the best of jazz and Latin music to create a genre that is unique and wild. He's redefined Latin jazz!

It's not a special taste. An American composer should have something to say to a cab driver.