Composer Quotes · Page 6

Yes, Carl Vine stuck around. He's now number one composer for choreography.

— Graeme Murphy

Music composer Tanishk Bagchi has always believed in me.

— Jubin Nautiyal

I write songs about things that I'm simultaneously trying not to think about.

— Warren Zevon

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

— Leonard Bernstein

There's more musical freedom on Madison Avenue than anywhere else. It's an Eden for a composer.

— Mitch Leigh

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

— Enya

I'm blessed to be working with wizards like Vishal Bhardwaj as well as many young composers.

— Sukhwinder Singh

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

— Claude Debussy

I think it's good for the composer to teach because you always have new students and you have to begin at the…

— John Corigliano

I wanted to be a composer before anything else. And my sister was listening to Led Zeppelin in the other room! When…

— Steve Vai

I don't think there's such a difference between older and newer music as there is between one composer and another.

— Hilary Hahn

Intelligent analysis of the composer's intention and strict adherence to it automatically ensures sincerity.

— Kate Smith

I guess, for better or for worse, I am an American composer, and I've had a wonderful life being exactly that.

— Samuel Barber

What inspires me is not so much the music as the opportunity to interact with composers. I think that has driven everything…

— Robert Moog

I sometimes think that the most plaintive ditty has brought a fuller joy and of longer duration to its composer that the…

— Walter Savage Landor

Think it a vile habit to alter works of good composers, to omit parts of them, or to insert new-fashioned ornaments. This…

— Robert Schumann

On one hand you have a string quartet, which is not a symphony. On the other hand is you have me sampling…

— DJ Spooky

I don't claim to be a composer, and I realize my approach is pretty dopey in comparison to the true masters of…

— Aesop Rock

For my qualifying concert, Helmut Walcha would not coach Charles-Marie Widor or any American compositions. In his defense, his forte was Germanic…

— Barbara Harbach

When I’m creating at the piano, I tend to feel happy; but - the eternal dilemma - how can we be happy…

— Nino Rota

As a composer, I believe that music has the power to inspire a renewal of human consciousness, culture, and politics. And yet…

— John Luther Adams

Around eighth grade I decided I wanted to be a composer and that's what I went to college for. Just a few…

— Joanna Newsom

The reality is each new day and each project is another opportunity to learn, experiment and try something I haven't done before.…

— Jason Graves

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

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

In my opinion, the trombone is the true head of the family of wind instruments, which I have named the 'epic' one.…

— Hector Berlioz

As to...old composers like Schubert or Beethoven, I imagine that, while modern music expresses both feeling, thought and imagination, they expressed pure…

— Anonymous

I was composing before I realised I was a composer. It came more or less naturally. There were a couple of old…

— Richard Meale

Our life as consumers seems light years away from that of our grandparents. But you don't change human nature. Optimism, for me,…

— Ed Mayo

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 genius of a composer is found in the notes of his music; but analyzing the notes will not reveal his genius.…

— Anthony de Mello

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

Gifted women musicians and composers rarely received their due.

— James Cook

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

— Anonymous

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

— Ernest Newman

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

When you are known as this cutting-edge composer all the time... it's no longer cutting-edge.

— Du Yun

I was not influenced by composers as much as by natural objects and physical phenomena.

— Edgard Varese