Composer Quotes

I'm a film composer, but I'm a hip-hop guy.

— Adrian Younge

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

— Igor Stravinsky

I'm not an intellectual composer.

— Les Baxter

I always wanted to be a spontaneous composer.

— Charles Mingus

I'm a visual-driven music composer.

— Devi Sri Prasad

The model of a composer.

— Benjamin Britten

I wanted to be a composer.

— Frank Sinatra Jr

The composer makes plans, music laughs.

— Morton Feldman

Claude Debussy was a rare phenomenon a composer profoundly and subversively revolutionary.

— Claude Debussy

Gifted women musicians and composers rarely received their due.

— James Cook

A good composer is slowly discovered and a bad composer is slowly found out.

— Ernest Newman

You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.

— Anonymous

Jerry Goldsmith is the #1 composer working now. He's open to new ideas and always inventing.

— Elmer Bernstein

A composer's job involves the decoration of fragments of time.

— Frank Zappa

Wagner is a composer who has beautiful moments but awful quarter hours.

— Gioachino Rossini

If you're a good composer, you steal good steals.

— Leonard Bernstein

If a composer has a nice wife and some nice children, how can he let the children starve on his dissonances?

— Charles Ives

I was very drawn to music of all types, from Beethoven to Jimi Hendrix. There were musicians and composers who obviously were…

— Frederick Lenz

You never know what you're going to share. I can play, I know what is written - the marks, the things the…

— Igor Levit

What gives Bach and Mozart a place apart is that these two great expressive composers never sacrificed form to expression.

— Camille Saint-Saens

I'm trying to interpret the film through the director's head, but it all comes out through me. So, a composer is kind…

— Danny Elfman

He's not a performer, he's not a composer, he's not even a musician, but Norman Granz is Mr. Jazz.

— Oscar Peterson

A lot of composers before me have been on this mission to change the world by getting off equal temperament, and I'm…

— Aphex Twin

The art of making films is a collaborative art. As a composer, you're always working with the cinematographer because he's so much…

— Howard Shore

Occasionally I hear a band that blows me away. For instance, there's a musician in Oakland named Weasel Walter who has a…

— Glenn Branca

Miranda [Hentoff] is a complete musician. She's a composer, a singer. She writes scripts along - with her projects. And she's a…

— Nat Hentoff

I grew up not really listening to guitar players. Especially when I was studying music, I was just interested in piano players…

— Daniel Rossen

My entire education in music was in reading interviews with bands like Stereolab and finding out about Brazilian music or a Romanian…

— Bradford Cox

The field of the novel is very rich. If you're a composer, you're well aware of the history of composition, and you…

— Salman Rushdie

Sondheim informs us, more than any other composer, about the joys, passion and pain of being a woman living in various social…

— Hannah Waddingham

With the new technology that keeps entering the media, film composers are constantly being placed in new learning situations. Acknowledging this and…

— Henry Mancini

I grew up mostly in Champaign, Illinois. My dad was at the University of East Illinois, so I was always around the…

— Stuart Hamm

Virgil Thomson, the great classical music critic, who was also a composer, but said that criticism was the only antidote he knew…

— Terry Teachout

It is only by demanding the impossible of the piano that you can obtain from it all that is possible. For the…

— Heinrich Neuhaus

Thorny compositions that sound as if female teen punkers the Shaggs received doctorates in the music of 12-tone composer Alban Berg, and…

— Elliott Sharp

When I'm writing a play I hear it like music. I use the same indications that a composer does for duration. There's…

— Edward Albee

It is possible I never learned the names of birds in order to discover the bird of peace, the bird of paradise,…

— Anais Nin

There are great jazz educators that I meet all the time. I met a guy named Paul Luchessi who has a high…

— Jon Gordon

When we look at the arts and letters in America, especially if we look at poetry, and poetry set to music, this…

— Thomas Hampson

I don't understand why we have to experiment with film. I think everything should be done on paper. A musician has to…

— Alfred Hitchcock