Composer Quotes · Page 8

Everything we do is music." (Classical Composer)(From: 4'33")

— John Cage

To be a success as a Broadway composer, you must be Jewish or gay. I'm both.

— Leonard Bernstein

The ability to understand and deliver comedy and tragedy is extremely rare in one composer.

— Signe Baumane

The composer opens the cage door for arithmetic, the draftsman gives geometry its freedom.

— Jean Cocteau

You've got to be an editor in order to be a good composer.

— Henry Mancini

The public doesn't want new music; the main thing it demands of a composer is that he be dead.

— Arthur Honegger

The composers hated me. The singers detested me. The guitarists were terrified by me.

— Bulat Okudzhava

To judge a composer's work, one must consider it as a whole.

— Gustav Mahler

A composer knows that music is written by human beings for human beings and that music is a continuation of life, not…

— Hanns Eisler

“Many contemporary composers have been building walls of sounds following their own clever devices. But then, who lives inside those rooms?”

— Toru Takemitsu

I'm not an original composer. The tunes are not stolen from other tunes necessarily except in a few cases, but they're in…

— Tom Lehrer

I feel that I belong to the 19th century. Some composers' music is very topical. It almost says, 'This is about what…

— Gordon Getty

As a composer at a point where I can absolutely pick and choose what I want to do, I don't want to…

— Andrew Lloyd Webber

The real composer thinks about his work the whole time; he is not always conscious of this, but he is aware of…

— Igor Stravinsky

The opportunities of man are limited only by his imagination. But so few have imagination that there are ten thousand fiddlers to…

— Charles Kettering

Composers are in some ways the last frontier of musician that gets a paycheck for their musical services.

— Cliff Martinez

It was about finding creative, original musicians. Musicians who are strong composers. Flexible, empathetic musicians, who are great individually but who also…

— Joshua Redman

Magicians are typically introverted; they don't tend to work with others, but I work with software programmers, composers, designers, so it's a…

— Marco Tempest

I wanted to be a film composer because I heard scores that could stand alone, from 'Vertigo' to 'Star Wars' to 'La…

— Alexandre Desplat

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

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 father was a very good amateur pianist, and he had a collection of books on technique. One of the things he…

— Marc-Andre Hamelin

The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated…

— Daniel Levitin

With so much reading ahead of you, the temptation might be to speed up. But in fact it’s essential to slow down…

— Francine Prose

We've always said we're a HEAVY METAL band. We've kinda branched out here and there - we've done a rap thing, we've…

— Charlie Benante

The humor of jazz is rich and many-sided. Some of it is obvious enough to make a dog laugh. Some is subtle,…

— Bix Beiderbecke

I'm less interested in uniqueness than in goodness. I see so many concerts where the program notes are more interesting than the…

— Anna Meredith

The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the…

— Claude Levi-Strauss

Seen from the point of view of the composer, the most nonsensical practice is that of casting people in musicals who are…

— Ernest Gold

I was always trying to be a quote, unquote, film composer.

— Henry Mancini

'Neverwhere,' by Benjamin Millepied, is set to his favorite composer, Nico Muhly.

— Robert Gottlieb

Bernard Herrmann was a genius, a great, great composer.

— Michel Hazanavicius

What is music about? You can't listen to one era, one composer, and know what music is about.

— Twyla Tharp

To call somebody a Jewish composer is obviously redundant.

— Mitch Leigh

I was in the army, and I had given up the thought of being a composer.

— Mitch Leigh

Composers often think in terms of music and not of an instrument itself.

— Michala Petri

In my next lifetime, I want to come back as a composer.

— Bob Fosse