Composer Quotes
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Our interpretations through the years and generations have always changed, but the emotions, ideas, and the thoughts of the composers are still with us, and these are the premise of the music. The time factor has little to do with it because, after all, it is about human feeling, the Universe and who we are as people.
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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.
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There's more musical freedom on Madison Avenue than anywhere else. It's an Eden for a composer.
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If a composer is to reach his audience emotionally - and surely that's what theatre music is all about - he must reach the people through sounds they can relate to.
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It's hard to decide how to match words to music. It's not like it's twice the work. It's always difficult for me to explain to the composer what I'm looking for. I'm not a professional; I lack even basic knowledge about writing music.
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When you think of Mitch Leigh as a businessman, remember he's also a composer. And when you think of Mitch Leigh as a composer, remember he's also a businessman.
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Classic music somehow changed, and it changed between the first and the second world wars, and somehow what happened was that the hero that had been the composer, the hero now was the performer, and especially the conductor.
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Even though, theoretically, being a composer and being a songwriter are the same thing, in my brain, they are completely different. When I am in my composing mode, I go into my studio and turn that part of my brain on like a faucet. And when I finish, I turn it off. But with songwriting, that process is much more elusive.
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Every composer's music reflects in its subject-matter and in its style the source of the money the composer is living on while writing the music.
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The greatest composer does not sit down to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working.
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The challenge to the improvisor is to get permanence into his spontaneity. The challenge to the composer is to get spontaneity into his permanence.
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I am a passionate, committed composer, and the guy I used to write musicals with, once he was able to ditch me and get a better composer, actually won the Tony.
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The artist must forget the audience, forget the critics, forget the technique, forget everything but love for the music. Then, the music speaks through the performance, and the performer and the listener will walk together with the soul of the composer, and with God.
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It's not a special taste. An American composer should have something to say to a cab driver.
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The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working. Beethoven, Wagner, Bach and Mozart settled down day after day to the job in hand with as much regularity as an accountant settles down each day to his figures. They didn't waste time waiting for inspiration.
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What gives Bach and Mozart a place apart is that these two great expressive composers never sacrificed form to expression.
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To call somebody a Jewish composer is obviously redundant.
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The psychological detective story in "Equus" made Peter Shaffer's name as a playwright. But it was his next play, "Amadeus," that cemented his reputation, largely because of the movie version. Another battle of wills, it was the story of composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart seen through the eyes of lesser composer Antonio Salieri.
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I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.
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Nobody can give a good performance unless the authors and composers have written a good part, a fact which is often overlooked.
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I dare suggest that the composer would do himself and his music an immediate and eventual service by total, resolute and voluntary withdrawal from this public world to one of private performance and electronic media.
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Salieri was a pupil of Gluck. He was born in Italy in 1750 and died in Vienna in 1825. He left Italy when he was 16 and spent most of his life in Vienna. He's the key composer between classic music and romantic music. Beethoven was the beginning of romantic music, and he was the teacher of Beethoven and Schubert.
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Communists love to make films about composers, because composers compose music and don't talk subversive things.
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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.
