Composer Quotes

Today each composer is not only involved in aesthetics, but he's actually trying to create his own language.
Leo Ornstein

Today, Trying, Language

The difference between the student and the born composer is he really hears the thing, and they have to stage it and manipulate it by technical equipment.
Leo Ornstein

Between, Student, Born

It doesn't necessarily mean at all that the composer plays his own works best.
Leo Ornstein

Best, Mean, Works

One of my heroes is a composer named James Bernard, and oh my God... I can still listen to his music today and be stirred and moved by it. But I think that you fall in love with... Well, again, when you're young, it really is more powerful. Much more terrifying.
John Carpenter

Love, Music, God

Which is why, in my lieder concerts, I always strove, when possible, to sing only the works of a single composer, so that the audience could be gradually drawn into a particular creative genius' way of thinking, and could follow him.
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

Single, Thinking, Him

If you only do little clusters - three or four songs by one, and another, and then yet another - you lose the opportunity to think your way into the composer's mind, since, after all, most of these pieces are quite brief.
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

Mind, After, Another

The thing about influence is that any composer worth anything will give you the same names.
Harrison Birtwistle

Give, Same, Worth

I'm not an architectural composer.
Harrison Birtwistle

Since the composer has said everything, if you discover everything, it will be enough and you will be a happy man. Don't try to say it's your taste, and because of that you are changing this or that. And I must say this respect is still there.
Kurt Masur

Respect, Happy, Everything

I am writing something which I find satisfying and which I am prepared to put my name to as a composer.
Gavin Bryars

Writing, Find, Put

As I get older, I'm slowing down and, yes, calming down in my desire to be taken seriously. That I can be entertaining and funny and high nervous energy can work against me as a serious composer, slowly but surely you'll see me be quieter just so that people will listen.
Marvin Hamlisch

Funny, Work, Down

I think that one of the things that influences me most as a composer is to what extent I can deconstruct and reconstruct the material that I'm working with.
Fred Frith

Working, Material, Influences

The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working.
Ernest Newman

Work, Great, Working

When my opera Plump Jack was performed in 1989, my first piano teacher sent me something that I'd composed when I was four. I remember I played it, and it still sounded like me. I'm the same composer I was then.
Gordon Getty

Teacher, Remember, Same

I just have to take my chances like any other composer.
Gordon Getty

In any case, Ives encouraged me to go into music even though he himself had such a hard time being a composer.
Elliott Carter

Music, Time, Hard

Aaron Copland was a man that had a very specific point of view about what music should be which was that, he felt that new music should have the composer should show a personality in his music.
Elliott Carter

Music, Show, Point

Soon, I knew that I would become a chemist, rather than a composer.
Richard Ernst

Become, Rather, Knew

Well, let me, first of all, say, that as a microtonal composer, I've never been much of a theorist.
John Eaton

I think the composer and production staff of an opera have a real responsibility to use visual elements of all kinds to make clear to the American audience, at any rate, exactly what is going on.
John Eaton

Real, American, Audience

You'll know if you're a famous composer if 20 years from now your name appears on a pull-down menu in Band in a Box, alongside Hans Zimmer.
Cliff Martinez

Famous, Band, Name

I am not so complicated or intelligent a composer, nor am I very interested in becoming so. I am much more happy doing what I know I can do than what I am not sure I could do.
Giorgio Moroder

Happy, Sure, Interested

I'm not an intellectual composer.
Les Baxter

If you aim at anything lower that is expecting your audience to be really alert and aware, then you're going to be caught out sooner or later as a composer.
Peter Maxwell Davies

Aim, Audience, Later

I dream of a collaboration that would finally be total, in which the librettist would often think as a composer and the composer as a librettist.
Jacques Ibert

Dream, Often, Finally

At the same time, one of the things I noticed was that the moment there was any kind of audio attached to virtual reality, it really improved the experience, even though the audio didn't feel like a sound engineer or composer had been anywhere near it.
Thomas Dolby

Time, Experience, Reality

I think Bach is equally a romantic composer because he laid the seeds harmonically for people like Chopin and the great Romantics, Brahms, so it's difficult to you know all this like labelling and putting - I think Bach is attractive to musicians because he supersedes the labels.
Nigel Kennedy

Great, Romantic, Difficult

I can think and play stuff in classical music that possibly violinists who didn't have access to other types of music could never do. It means I'm more flexible within classical music, to be a servant to the composer.
Nigel Kennedy

Music, Play, Means

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.
Richard Rodney Bennett

Away, Decide, Eventually

I don't think a guy that really has no understanding about people, or has no interest in understanding people would make a good film composer.
Stanley Clarke

Good, Film, Guy

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