Composers Quotes
-
Composers are influenced by all the important music in their lives - and I suppose that since radio started playing popular music, that's as likely to be The Beatles or Aphex Twin as it is to be Verdi or Ravel.
Jonny Greenwood
Radiohead
-
Music is at once the product of feeling and knowledge, for it requires from its disciples, composers and performers alike, not only talent and enthusiasm, but also that knowledge and perception which are the result of protracted study and reflection.
Alban Berg
-
Composers are in some ways the last frontier of musician that gets a paycheck for their musical services.
Cliff Martinez
-
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.
Antonio Damasio
-
I suppose I was affected by raw sounds and timbres more than a lot of other composers. Had I been involved with orchestral composing, I think the aspect that would have most endeared me to that field would have been the orchestration.
Wendy Carlos
-
Is there a gender gap in the music industry? It is true that there are more professional male music creators than female. For some reason, it's taking a lot longer in music than in literature and the visual arts to reach equilibrium. It was almost acceptable by the 19th century for female writers to be published, yet it's only in the last couple of decades, since about 1980, that historical female composers have really emerged.
Barbara Harbach
-
There are certain composers I have always admired very much, but I have always admired nature mostly and the music of the Orient.
Alan Hovhaness
-
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.
Stewart Copeland
The Police
-
A lot of composers before me have been on this mission to change the world by getting off equal temperament, and I'm definitely one of those.
Aphex Twin
-
I have written six symphonies, they are smaller-scale works. I seem to emit my themes, work them out, combine and intertwine them, and then come to a close. I usually feel that there are no superfluous extras, but probably most composers feel that way about their works.
Barbara Harbach
-
Thankfully, it is getting better for women composers. We now have five women Pulitzer Prize winners in music since 1983: Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Shulamit Ran, Melinda Wagner, Jennifer Higdon, and Caroline Shaw. When Marin Alsop was asked what it felt like to conduct the Last Night of the Proms, she said, "I am exceedingly proud to be 'the first' but I am also a bit shocked that there can still be firsts for women in 2013!"
Barbara Harbach
-
The humor of jazz is rich and many-sided. Some of it is obvious enough to make a dog laugh. Some is subtle, wry-mouthed, or back-handed. It is by turns bitter, agonized, and grotesque. Even in the hands of white composers it involuntarily reflects the half-forgotten suffering of the negro. Jazz has both white and black elements, and each in some respects has influenced the other. It's recent phase seems to throw the light of the white race's sophistication upon the anguish of the black.
Bix Beiderbecke