Composer Quotes

Everything we do is music." (Classical Composer)(From: 4'33")

The highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist, is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may.

If you're reading a comic strip, you can read it at any speed you want. But with film and music, the audience has to take it the way the composer gives it.

That was my challenge as a composer. Like with anything, to keep yourself interested in doing what you do, you set yourself challenges. So I said, Okay, I'll try to write a hundred tunes in a year.

I had a really nice association with Richie DeRosa, a great musician, a great drummer and composer and arranger. And I had a number of classes with him.

Alan [Ferber] is a great trombonist and composer. I'm thankful that I got some associations like that through peers and former students. That's kind of what it is.

[We need] someone like Don Sickler, who is an amazing trumpet player and who is also a publisher and amazing producer and composer and arranger. There's a lot of ways you can make a contribution.

Wynton Marsalis' skills have grown as fast as his ambition, and he is the most ambitious younger composer in Jazz.

One important thing, just being a film composer in general, is to have a great respect for the art that you're working on - a great respect for the film and a great respect for the filmmakers.

I write arrangements. Im sort of a wannabe composer.

I think actors really like to know what does a casting agent really think or what does a composer really think.

Yes, for me audio-visual performance has its roots in my experience working as an improvising musician and composer.

Every composer understands and uses the system of notation differently, and that's what makes you appreciate the trouble they go through in doing so.

I would prefer to listen to a French classical composer like Olivier Messiaen than to the pop hits of the day.

Each time a dancer moves devoutly or a composer faithfully searches the silence for the veiled melodies, eternity is engaged.

[Composers] Mark [Shaiman] and Scott [Wittman] are unreal.

As a young composer I had a particular fondness for Liszt's Beethoven Symphony arrangements for the piano, and to this day I enjoy playing non-piano music at the piano.

Each composer has their own language, and I try to meet the challenges, even if at first sight, they appear impossible.

Composers often think in terms of music and not of an instrument itself.

Bernard Herrmann was a genius, a great, great composer.

Thank you, Wes... You've been a great inspiration. You are like a conductor. You are like a composer... You inspire us, all of us... If it wasn't for you...I couldn't have done it this way.

Communists love to make films about composers, because composers compose music and don't talk subversive things.

To call somebody a Jewish composer is obviously redundant.

I was in the army, and I had given up the thought of being a composer.

You know creators, composers, need a palette for life, a color for life.

If a composer could state in words what being a composer means, he would no longer need to be a composer.

I'm a nut for Bach as a composer.

I came up in the '60s; that was a time when there was a revolution going on in music. Stravinsky had become a twelve-tone composer; even Aaron Copland was writing twelve-tone pieces at that time!

As a composer I approached the drums differently than a non-composing drummer. I embraced drum machines.

Originally, I wanted to be a composer. I always tell people, 'I think of myself as a composer.

Did I become court composer through masterful procrastination? Hardly!

Both costume and fashion are about telling a story, except that in a ballet the story has already been written by the composer or the librettist.

If I were to die tomorrow, I think they'd say Newman 56, composer of the hit song, Short People. Jumped off a mountain today.

I was composing before I realised I was a composer. I mean it came more or less naturally.

I just scribbled away and eventually a C-major chord was there. I didn't ever decide I was going to be a composer. It was like being tall. It's what I was. It's what I did.

I am under no illusion that I will ever be the greatest opera composer in the world, with Wagner and Verdi and Strauss before me. I think my work could fit very nicely into musicals, though.

I am an interpreter of music rather than a composer of it.

I am not a composer of music; I sing pieces which have been written for me which gives me bigger freedom to search for pieces I want to record.

I wanted to be a composer for a while, and for a while, and maybe still, I found writing music much easier than writing poetry. So maybe my brain clings to it.

I don't think a guy that really has no understanding about people, or has no interest in understanding people would make a good film composer.

I wanted to be a composer before anything else. And my sister was listening to Led Zeppelin in the other room! When I heard that, it was a game-changer.

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.

In many ways I'm an experimental and new music composer that comes from a rural tradition rather than an urban one.

I'm not an original composer. The tunes are not stolen from other tunes necessarily except in a few cases, but they're in the style of songs that I grew up with.

Chess problems demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity

I sometimes think that the most plaintive ditty has brought a fuller joy and of longer duration to its composer that the conquest of Persia to the Macedonian.

It’s really strange, but they speak to me — the notes and the chords. So when I hear other people’s music, I can feel the composer. Whoever created that, I can see in their soul.

There was that sound again--snap, then a footfall. She tried to whirl around as a dark form--Dear God--sprang with a splash from the darkness--grabbed her from behind, shoved her under the water.

Music is exciting and easy to enjoy, the rhythm and voice.It does not need interpretation. That is why it is called the Universal Language.

In a timepiece, a sweep of a second hand is so slim in a way that it doesn't wait for no man, and that's why we choose to conceive things from the heart.