Composer Quotes
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Every bit of theorizing I’ve ever done, including my interest in Berg, has come as a consequence of discoveries I made as a composer and interests that I developed as a composer. I never thought of my theory as being a kind of irrelevant activity to my composing.
George Perle
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Any composer who is gloriously conscious that he is a composer must believe that he receives his inspiration from a source higher than himself.
John Philip Sousa
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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.
Virginia Graham
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The composer...joins Heaven and Earth with threads of sounds.
Alan Hovhaness
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The modern composer builds his works on the basis of truth.
Claudio Monteverdi
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Did I become court composer through masterful procrastination? Hardly!
Rachel Hartman
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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.
Claude Levi-Strauss
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Since music is a reflection of our mindset and our culture, it is bound to change with time. I am glad that India is such a receiving country and is always open to all kinds of music. Our composers, singers and writers are open to experimenting.
Sonu Nigam
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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.
Brian Eno Roxy Music
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The public doesn't want new music; the main thing it demands of a composer is that he be dead.
Arthur Honegger
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People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet.
Witold Lutosławski
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I am an interpreter of music rather than a composer of it.
Sarah Brightman
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As a composer I could never find use for over 4 or 5 notes in any musical number, and as a playwright most of my plays have two acts because i couldn't think of an idea for the third act.
George M. Cohan
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I am a composer in search of oblivion; and I'm always slightly ashamed to admit that I compose.
Alexander Borodin
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One day I'll be able to relax a bit, and try and become a good composer.
Benjamin Britten
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Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.
Hector Berlioz
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Music is not written in red, white and blue. It is written in the heart's blood of the composer.
Nellie Melba
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I began my career with infantile dreams of becoming a composer.
Ivor Novello
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The model of a composer.
Benjamin Britten
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I am an arrogant and impatient listener, but in the case of a few composers, a very few, when I hear a work I do not like, I am convinced that it is my own fault. Verdi is one of those composers.
Benjamin Britten
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I was starting a group of musicians and we had a group of young composers in Finland back in the '70s, and the real conductors, the professional conductors at the time were not interested in our stuff.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
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I still the love classic period, but also the baroque period, and even 17th-Century music such as the music of Monteverdi. He's one of the greatest opera composers. He was the one who really started the opera.
Cecilia Bartoli
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Tim Price continues to explore and develop his deeply personal approach to music. Through the years his persistence, determination and passion has enabled him to create a stellar reputation as a multiple woodwind master, composer, producer, author and last but not least educator. Tim is one of the best musicians active today and I'm happy to say he's my friend.
Bennie Maupin
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Whether I was in my body or out of my body as I wrote it I know not. God knows.
George Frideric Handel