Composer Quotes · Page 4

Human warmth is perhaps the most lacking in a composer who lives his life in a recording studio.

— Fabio Frizzi

The problem with composers is that they are the most unrequired job in America.

— Gail Zappa

It's nice to have a great female composer in the program and add her color.

— Cecilia Bartoli

We should make the poor uncomfortable and kick them out of poverty.

— Benjamin Franklin

I'm not really a professional composer; I just compose now and then when someone asks me to.

— Stephen Hough

America can well expect to develop a goodly amount of composers for she has a goodly number of people.

— John Philip Sousa

I started writing music as a composer in school, in the classical tradition.

— Julia Holter

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

— Alfred Schnittke

I always go back to the original material. I want a good connection as the composer and writer of the score to…

— Howard Shore

Performing was always something that I actually used to do before I settled in the studio as a composer.

— Ramin Djawadi

If I were to die tomorrow, I think they'd say Newman 56, composer of the hit song, Short People. Jumped off a…

— Randy Newman

I really like acting, but logically getting on stage to transmit the work of a composer who is inspired by God is…

— Jose Jose

With a musical, you kind of have to do a mind-meld with the book-writer, the lyricist, the composer, the director - sometimes…

— David Henry Hwang

I have always believed that I need a circumference of silence. As to what happens to when I composer, I really haven't…

— Samuel Barber

Fortunately, I started very young, so I read music very well. And my favorite composers to play are Brahms and Mozart.

— Condoleezza Rice

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

— John Corigliano

I have been told that a young would-be composer wrote to Mozart asking advice about how to compose a symphony. Mozart responded…

— Isaac Asimov

The culture of suppressing women composers and performers goes centuries back in Germany and other countries. Just think of Fanny Mendelssohn and…

— Barbara Harbach

It is a pleasant surprise to him (the pure mathematician) and an added problem if he finds that the arts can use…

— George Santayana

I'm a fan of 20th century orchestral music, the experimental avant-garde composers of the '50s, '60s, and '70s. In horror movies you…

— Christopher Young

The composer reveals the innermost nature of the world, and expresses the profoundest wisdom in a language that his reasoning faculty does…

— Arthur Schopenhauer

Music acts on the whole of the organism like a magic force which suppresses the understanding and irresistibly takes possession of the…

— Emile Jaques-Dalcroze

Any working composer or painter or sculptor will tell you that inspiration comes at the eighth hour of labour rather than as…

— Anonymous

I recall improvisational drummer and composer Michael Evans telling me a story of someone who had the opportunity to meet Cage and…

— David Grubbs

Before writing a single note of music, and even before the spotting session, I find it best to sit down with the…

— John Keltonic

Improvisation was the blood and bone of jazz, and in the classic, New Orleans jazz it was collective improvisation in which each…

— Russell Lynes

“Having renounced his native land, Sanger adopted no other. He roved about from one European capital to another, never settling anywhere for…

— Margaret Kennedy

“A deaf composer's like a cook who's lost his sense of taste. A frog that's lost its webbed feet. A truck driver…

— Haruki Murakami

All is made clear,regarding Abraham and Sarah's traversal into Egypt, when we realize what biblicists meant by the term "Egypt." As Ralph…

— Michael Tsarion

What will be the judgment a century hence concerning the lorded works of our favorite composers today? Inasmuch as nearly everything is…

— Ludwig van Beethoven

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

— Ernest Gold

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

The terror of performing never goes away. Instead, you get very, very comfortable being terrified.

— Eric Whitacre

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful.

— Benjamin Britten

I'm a very style-driven composer, and I like to give every project its own unique stamp.

— Alan Menken

One day the 'Maple Leaf' will make me King of Ragtime Composers.

— Scott Joplin

I write arrangements. I'm sort of a wannabe composer.

— Joshua Bell

It is the power of music to carry one directly into the mental state of the composer.

— Ludwig van Beethoven

I listen to my songs as if it's a song made by some other composer.

— Devi Sri Prasad

Since Mozart's day composers have learned the art of making music throatily and palpitatingly sexual.

— Aldous Huxley