Composers Quotes

We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.
Brian Eno

Music, Experience, Thought

I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself, in a sense, in the mid 1960s really, when I first heard composers like Terry Riley, and when I first started playing with tape recorders.
Brian Eno

Music, Sense, Idea

I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First to discourage the composer from writing any more and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven.
Jascha Heifetz

Writing, Two, Play

Composers in the old days used to keep strictly to the base of the theme, as their real subject. Beethoven varies the melody, harmony and rhythms so beautifully.
Johannes Brahms

Real, Old, Keep

Sincere composers believe in God.
John Philip Sousa

Nobody can give a good performance unless the authors and composers have written a good part, a fact which is often overlooked.
Judy Holliday

Good, Give, Fact

Composers shouldn't think too much - it interferes with their plagiarism.
Howard Dietz

Plagiarism, Interferes

I was always drawn to Broadway musicals, and obviously composers like Gershwin, Rodgers, Berlin and Porter were writing music that I found wildly impressive.
Marvin Hamlisch

Music, Writing, Found

Playwrights have texts, composers have scores, painters and sculptors have the residue of those activities, and dance is traditionally an ephemeral, effervescent, here-today-gone-tomorrow kind of thing.
Twyla Tharp

Dance, Activities, Painters

My favorite instrument is the snare drum. In Scotland, the snare drum is very prominent in Highland bands. The Scottish style of playing is in my blood. It's a very powerful instrument, but it can also be soothing, like velvet. It's a real challenge for composers.
Evelyn Glennie

Powerful, Real, Challenge

Let us not forget that the greatest composers were also the greatest thieves. They stole from everyone and everywhere.
Pablo Casals

Greatest, Forget, Everyone

My musical knowledge is so bad it's embarrassing. When composers discuss music with someone as primitive as myself, they have to talk about it in terms of senses and emotion, rather than keys and tempo.
Jane Campion

Music, Knowledge, Bad

There's still a lot I need to do as a player, as a musician, as a sound creator. I have commissioned 170 pieces: that's still not enough, there are still lots and lots of composers I would like to approach. When I see a composer and I see a performer, I think to combine those forces.
Evelyn Glennie

Enough, Sound, Player

A large part of my work has been collaborating with composers; I think we've commissioned about 140 pieces now, a lot of them percussion concertos.
Evelyn Glennie

Work, Large, Pieces

Before I was 5, I did have a lot of time on my hands. I had no job and really no career, and I spent an awful lot of time listening to records. It was more the classical ones, really - Prokofiev, and I think there was some Mozart in there, and more impressionistic composers like Delius.
Wallace Shawn

Time, Job, Career

I tend to listen to the classical composers: Rachmaninov, Satie.
Enya

Listen, Classical, Tend

Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules... Mathematicians are more like classical composers.
Brian Greene

Rules, Willing, Classical

Jazz has been such a force in music, that any musician, including classical composers, have been influenced, and obviously performers, also.
Yo-Yo Ma

Music, Force, Jazz

Composers are the only people who can hear good music above bad sounds.
John Philip Sousa

Music, Good, Bad

I don't use composers. I research music the way I research the photographs or the facts in my scripts.
Ken Burns

Music, Research, Facts

Other composers have taken this particular technique much further than I in the meantime, with the result that the Law of Diminishing Returns has begun to apply.
Brian Ferneyhough

Law, Result, Taken

The Western musical canon came about not merely by accumulation, but by opposition and subversion, both to the ruling powers on whom composers depended for their livelihoods and to other musics.
Brian Ferneyhough

Both, Musical, Opposition

Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries.
Brian Ferneyhough

Often, Argue, Dialogue

When I began, the guitar was en-closed in a vicious circle. There were no composers writing for the guitar, be-cause there were no virtuoso guitarists.
Andres Segovia

Writing, Guitar, Circle

Most of the important composers in our country are clustered in the Northeast.
Carlisle Floyd

Important, Country, Northeast

It's amazing how fast generations lose sight of other generations. One of the first things the young composers who come to work with me say is that they want to write music people will like, instead of gaining their credentials by being rejected by the audience.
Carlisle Floyd

Music, Work, Amazing

Music is at once the product of feeling and knowledge, for it requires from its disciples, composers and performers alike, not only talent and enthusiasm, but also that knowledge and perception which are the result of protracted study and reflection.
Alban Berg

Music, Knowledge, Feeling

I loved Hendrix. I mean, really, really loved him. As if he were one of the great classical composers. And he was. That's how I saw him.
Warren Zevon

Great, Mean, Him

I think the thing's that perhaps sad really is that younger people haven't come in and I think it must have been absolutely fantastic to have worked in the 50's when you had all of the great Broadway composers and when West Side Story didn't win the Tony Award.
Andrew Lloyd Webber

Great, Sad, Win

Composers, like authors, have a lot in common. Our main goal is to connect with the listener emotionally.
Ken Hill

Goal, Common, Connect

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