Audience Quote by Charles Ives

The composer does not sit around and wait for an inspiration to walk up and introduce itself…Making music is actually little else than a…

— George Gershwin

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

— Gustav Mahler

It is hard to think of another composer who so perfectly marries form and passion.

— Leonard Bernstein

“What is the use of composing if it is to confine the product within the precinct of the concert or the solitude of listening…

— Roland Barthes

Any composer who is gloriously conscious that he is a composer must believe that he receives his inspiration from a source higher than himself.

— John Philip Sousa

There's an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing music, into searching…

— David Bowie

Composers are very individual creatures.

— Krzysztof Penderecki

If a composer could state in words what being a composer means, he would no longer need to be a composer.

— Ned Rorem

Every piece of music is a form of personal expression for its creator...If a work doesnt express the composers own personal point of view,…

— Dmitri Shostakovich

“I’m sure you’ve noticed, continued Comrade Luria, how much aestheticians like to prate about the impotence of form without content, or content without form.…

— William T. Vollmann

“[If] it were possible to watch composing in the same way that one can watch painting, if composers could have _ateliers_ as did painters,…

— Arnold Schoenberg

It's the vision of the composer that we have to determine, and not the absolute mathematical adherence of the score. In my experience, there…

— Marc-Andre Hamelin