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.
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The modern composer builds his works on the basis of truth.
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Human warmth is perhaps the most lacking in a composer who lives his life in a recording studio.
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Did I become court composer through masterful procrastination? Hardly!
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I am an interpreter of music rather than a composer of it.
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In any case, once you're dealing on a nonverbal level, ambiguity is unavoidable. But it's the ambiguity of all art, of a fine piece of music or a painting - you don't need written instructions by the composer or painter accompanying such works to 'explain' them. “Explaining” them contributes nothing but a superficial 'cultural' value which has no value except for critics and teachers who have to earn a living.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I am a composer in search of oblivion; and I'm always slightly ashamed to admit that I compose.
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The public doesn't want new music; the main thing it demands of a composer is that he be dead.
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Music is not written in red, white and blue. It is written in the heart's blood of the composer.
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People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Whether I was in my body or out of my body as I wrote it I know not. God knows.
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Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.
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One day I'll be able to relax a bit, and try and become a good composer.
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The model of a composer.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I have a team, the same team of filmmakers I worked with on 'Pi' and 'Requiem'. Which is my cameraman, and my composer, and my producer. We've all worked together for a number of films.
