Composer Quotes

I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.
Richard Strauss

Because I have sixty years of being a professional composer, conductor, musician, whatever, and you develop a lot of friendships and you get involved with a lot of sort of long-term commitments and obligations.
Gunther Schuller

Whatever, Involved, Develop

I'm glad I won it because when I grew up the Pulitzer was the award that every composer wanted and I was like that too.
John Corigliano

Wanted, Won, Glad

You become a great composer when you win a Pulitzer. But I think that now it's a completely meaningless award.
John Corigliano

Great, Win, Become

I think it's good for the composer to teach because you always have new students and you have to begin at the beginning and make things clear.
John Corigliano

Good, Beginning, Students

I find respect for a mediocre British composer, as opposed to a really good American, ridiculous because they automatically respect a composer if he's from England.
John Corigliano

Good, Respect, Find

Other, far fewer, directors are more like the composer - conceptualizing the piece, scoring it, distributing its musical lines among a range of registers, chords, and instruments.
Thomas Harrison

Far, Among, Piece

With Hitchcock I had little relationship. I was called to replace Bernard Herrmann, his favorite composer, in Torn Curtain, after the bitter fight between them.
Maurice Jarre

Fight, After, Between

I am a composer, horn player, and computer programmer.
Robert Patterson

Player, Computer, Programmer

Any subject is good for opera if the composer feels it so intently he must sing it out.
Gian Carlo Menotti

Good, Sing, Subject

Do you know that my very first experience as a composer was a 'Concerto for Accordion?'
Alfred Schnittke

Experience, Accordion, Concerto

I probably belong to a type of composer of songs who keeps thinking about melody... I am old fashioned.
Toru Takemitsu

Thinking, Old, Songs

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

Good, Great, Job

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.
Levi Strauss

Experience, Point, Musical

I continued to study Math and Physics on my own, but one and a half years later I realized that I did want to be a composer, and after that I never changed my mind.
Gyorgy Legeti

Mind, After, Study

I think a composer is always interested in his last work.
Gyorgy Legeti

Work, Last, Interested

The modern composer builds upon the foundation of truth.
Claudio Monteverdi

Truth, Modern, Foundation

I've always been a composer dependent on texts.
David Del Tredici

Dependent, Texts

A nation creates music - the composer only arranges it.
Mikhail Glinka

Music, Nation, Creates

That is basically me, and although I have done many things in my life - conducting, playing piano, and so on - what is fundamental is my being a composer.
Morton Gould

Life, Done, Playing

It's not a special taste. An American composer should have something to say to a cab driver.
Morton Gould

Special, American, Taste

Americans can pretty much sing anything, whereas foreign singers are often limited in style, language, even composer.
Marilyn Horne

Pretty, Often, Language

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.
Milton Babbitt

Music, Service, Public

It is my hope that during my brief passage through this universe, that I may share with you the joy of hearing the music of the stars... knowing that the composer was from a distant place and the songs were written eons ago, which now fall gently on this place for all to hear.
Richard H. Baker

Music, Hope, May

I am but an architectural composer.
Alexander Jackson Davis

I've come up with another formulation about style: that it's essentially a manifestation of a certain habitual set of limitations. It's what a composer does NOT do that defines a style.
James Tenney

Another, Style, Defines

Pianists call me a composer, composers call me a pianist. The classicists think me a futurist, and the futurists call me a reactionary.
Anton Rubinstein

Call, Composers, Pianist

A composer knows that music is written by human beings for human beings and that music is a continuation of life, not something separated from it.
Hanns Eisler

Life, Music, Human

There is no doubt that the first requirement for a composer is to be dead.
Arthur Honegger

I was meant to be a composer and will be I'm sure. Don't ask me to try to forget this unpleasant thing and go play football - please.
Samuel Barber

Forget, Football, Play

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