Composer Quotes

Like many composers, most of my compositions are influenced by the music I've listened to throughout my life.

To make a film, the final big collaborator that you have is the composer.

A supreme composer can only come out of a musical nation.

The (photographic) negative is the equivalent of the composers score and the print is the equivalent of the conductors performance.

I cannot listen to Beethoven or Mahler or Chopin or Bach when I write because those composers require you stop what you are doing and listen.

The composers hated me. The singers detested me. The guitarists were terrified by me.

The modern composer builds his works on the basis of truth.

The most important person is the audience and the composer. The rest of us - and even the composer is a servant to the audience. And of course, the audience is a servant to the higher art.

Puccini - silver macaroni, exquisitely tangled.

No composer has yet caught this rhythm of America - it is too mighty for the ears of most.

Jerry Goldsmith is an artist who meets all the demands upon the composer in films. He communicates, integrates, subordinates, supports, and designs with discipline.

I often wonder if I was destined to be a composer. I think I decided and I followed my star.

I am proud to be able to claim that, from the age of nineteen, I've managed to earna living entirely as a composer.

The challenge to the improvisor is to get permanence into his spontaneity. The challenge to the composer is to get spontaneity into his permanence.

Frank [Zappa] said he probably would have been a major criminal, given his brain power and his attention to detail, had he not been a composer. But being a composer is not something you can't help.

The ability to understand and deliver comedy and tragedy is extremely rare in one composer.

There are some composers - at the head of whom stands Beethoven - who not only do not know when to stop but appear to stop many times before they actually do.

I think he [composer Joe Raposo] was the first man who kissed me on the cheek.

Since Mozart's day composers have learned the art of making music throatily and palpitatingly sexual.

I always work with the same composer, his name is Ali Helnwein. I don't have a musical background.

For my qualifying concert, Helmut Walcha would not coach Charles-Marie Widor or any American compositions. In his defense, his forte was Germanic composers, and his forte was really a fortissimo!

What's great about [Guettel] is his very distinct voice as a composer. And that distinct voice is something worth cherishing and expressing so we just didn't want to screw that up.

With television you are producing hours and hours of music and for film it is a shorter experience for both the audience and for you as a composer.

The model of a composer.

I am a composer first and foremost, and have always believed that being able to write memorable melodies is what sets musicians apart.

As a major contemporary composer, Madonna should not let the eye dictate to the ear.

Notes are part of life for any composer for hire. There's no way around it. I think anyone who has done even a small number of films as a professional composer gets used to that idea pretty quickly.

I like directors that give their composer a juicy role in their films. Some films have a small, minor role for music, some have a larger role.

Once embarked on a course of sensationalism, the composer is forced into a descending spiral spin from which only the most experienced pilot can flatten out in time.

Wherever there’s a conductor, you’re sure to find a dead composer!

Im still getting used to being called a composer. A poseur, maybe.

When you think about a composer you know like Wagner or Pier Boulez or something like that most of the issues a composer is working with are about discreet, notated music that someone else will play.

If you're a composer, there's never a moment you're not working.

Jerry Goldsmith is the #1 composer working now. He's open to new ideas and always inventing.

I always felt that one day I would have to make the change in my own life, bite the bullet and see what it is to be a composer who conducts rather than the other way around.

Human warmth is perhaps the most lacking in a composer who lives his life in a recording studio.

In another life, I would love to be the art guy - a production designer or a maybe even a composer.

The people of your century no longer require the service of composers. A composer is as useful to a person in a jogging suit as a dinsoaur turd in the middle of his runway.

I can play the guitar, the dulcimer, the piano, and the drums. However, I am not a "performance quality" musician. Rather, I am a composer and a producer.

When you have a single composer writing his work, it shouldn't be doled out in singles based on the length of a piece.

My primary calling, I always knew since the age of 11, was as a composer, and so that had to take priority.

The music critic, Huneber, could never quite make up his mind about a new symphony until he had seen the composer's mistress.

One yearns unspeakably for a composer who gives out his pair of honest themes, and then develops them unashamed, and then hangs a brisk coda to them, and then shuts up.

There are wonderful composers and librettists out there. It's the lack of creative producers that is troubling.

If you're the sort of person that likes a job where once you know what you're doing you can keep doing what you're doing, don't ever become a film composer.

I always go back to the original material. I want a good connection as the composer and writer of the score to the director and to the source material. It's really important.

You never know what you're going to share. I can play, I know what is written - the marks, the things the composer tells me to do - and I do it, but it will still sound different each day.

Good composers don't borrow, they steal

The composer does not want the self-sufficiency of a richly complex text: he or she wants to feel that the text is something in need of musical setting.

Good music resembles something. It resembles the composer.