Alexander Borodin Quotes
I am a composer in search of oblivion; and I'm always slightly ashamed to admit that I compose.
Quotes to Explore
-
I guess, for better or for worse, I am an American composer, and I've had a wonderful life being exactly that.
-
I make me. At 18, I decided I wasn't going to have an unconstructed self ever. I was going to be the composer, the designer, the architect of me. It's been really fun.
-
Thrilled to be honoured by the ISM and to be joining such an eminent list of members who have received the Distinguished Musician Award.
-
Man has used human rhythmic movement as raw material out of which to create works of art, as the composer of music uses sound, the sculptor uses stone and wood, the painter his pigments, and the writer - words.
-
The composer...joins Heaven and Earth with threads of sounds.
-
Did I become court composer through masterful procrastination? Hardly!
-
The first requirement for a composer is to be dead.
-
To think about "oblivion" is to think about "what art is".
-
The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the listener anticipates on the basis of a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining. If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void. When the composer withholds less, the opposite occurs: he forces us to perform gymnastic exercises more skillful than our own.
-
I've been called a minimalist composer for more than 30 years, and while I've never really agreed with the description, I've gotten used to it.
-
Salomon saith, There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Salomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion.
-
What's past and what's to come is strew'd with husks And formless ruin of oblivion.
-
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.
-
If you think of the way a composer or say a pop arranger works - he has an idea and he writes it down, so there's one transmission loss. Then he gives the score to a group of musicians who interpret that, so there's another transmission loss. So he's involved with three information losses. Whereas what I nearly always do is work directly to the sound if it doesn't sound right. So there's a continuous loop going on.
-
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.
-
Ultimately, you're left with the people you love and who love you- everything else fades into oblivion.
-
The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling "Kilroy was here" on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.
-
Men thin away to insignificance and oblivion quite as often by not making the most of good spirits when they have them as by lacking good spirits when they are indispensable.
-
I always wanted to be a film composer. So very early on I started collecting soundtracks and paying attention to how movie music works. Actually I'd like to have the opportunity to conduct for the rest of my life.
-
I always thought I should base how good I am on how good I feel I am.
-
At least 90 percent of my work is in situ. For me, it's not only to work with the architecture and space, it's also to work with the time, to work with the people who are involved with the place. It's also dealing with history. It takes all this into account. Other works can be placed in different environments, but they always follow a rule. This is usually not the case for work in situ, because even if they are transported, they remain there forever or they are destroyed.
-
You know how if you're born in a certain situation you always expect your life to run on a steady trajectory? I've never really had a sense of that. I assume that life is going to go up and down.
-
I am a composer in search of oblivion; and I'm always slightly ashamed to admit that I compose.
