Browsing Topic Best Composer Quotes

Imagination creates reality.

In my opinion, the trombone is the true head of the family of wind instruments, which I have named the ‘epic’ one. It possesses nobility and grandeur to the highest degree; it has all the serious and powerful tones of sublime musical poetry, from religious, calm and imposing accents to savage, orgiastic outburst. Directed by the will of the master, the trombones can chant like a choir of priests, threaten, utter gloomy sighs, a mournful lament, or a bright hymn of glory; they can break forth into awe-inspiring cries and awaken the dead or doom the living with their fearful voices.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

If I weren’t a director, I would want to be a film composer.

The genius of a composer is found in the notes of his music; but analyzing the notes will not reveal his genius. The poet’s greatness is contained in his words; yet the study of his words will not disclose his inspiration. God reveals himself in creation; but scrutinize creation as minutely as you wish, you will not find God, any more than you will find the soul through careful examination of your body.

If a composer suffers from loss of sleep and his sleeplessness induces him to turn out masterpieces, what a profitable loss it is!

The old idea of a composer suddenly having a terrific idea and sitting up all night to write it is nonsense. Nighttime is for sleeping.

People who have gone, are still here, in us. Places we came from, are carried to the places we go.

Since the beginning of time, children have not liked to study. They would much rather play, and if you have their interests at heart, you will let them learn while they play.

Put all your soul into it, play the way you feel!

Every kind of music is good, except the boring kind.

Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.

The September 11 attacks were the greatest work of art in the cosmos…compared to that, we composers are nothing

Never look at the trombones, it only encourages them.

The architect is very interesting because the architect is the commander, meaning the one who commands all the workers. The architect is also the music director and composer. He cannot play each instrument, but he needs to understand and embody the sense of each part.

I have always believed that I need a circumference of silence. As to what happens to when I composer, I really haven’t the faintest idea.

I don’t meet stockbrokers or carpenters or coal miners; I spend all day with actors, composers and photographers.

A genius! For 37 years I’ve practised fourteen hours a day, and now they call me a genius!

When I am with composers, I say I am a conductor. When I am with conductors, I say I am a composer.

That is the way a great master carpenter feels, or an architect or composer or anyone who creates anything – people want to be appreciated for what they have done.

The first requirement for a composer is to be dead.

Men have been in the forefront of music for centuries, and they have written glorious music, loved and appreciated by many. In some ways, men are still in the forefront. There is a lot of room for composers of all types of music by both men and women, nowadays.

Composers are always going back to the past.

The Western musical canon came about not merely by accumulation, but by opposition and subversion, both to the ruling powers on whom composers depended for their livelihoods and to other musics.

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

When you build a building, you finish a building. You don’t finish a garden; you start it, and then it carries on with its life. So my analogy was really to say that we composers or some of us should think of ourselves as people who start processes rather than finish them. And there might be surprises.

The (photographic) negative is the equivalent of the composers score and the print is the equivalent of the conductors performance.

…stories about [the German composer Johannes] Brahms’s rudeness and wit amused me in particular. For instance, I loved the one about how a great wine connoisseur invited the composer to dinner. ‘This is the Brahms of my cellar,’ he said to his guests, producing a dust-covered bottle and pouring some into the master’s glass. Brahms looked first at the color of the wine, then sniffed its bouquet, finally took a sip, and put the glass down without saying a word. ‘Don’t you like it?’ asked the host. ‘Hmm,’ Brahms muttered. ‘Better bring your Beethoven!’

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

The composer reveals the innermost nature of the world, and expresses the profoundest wisdom in a language that his reasoning faculty does not understand, just as a magnetic somnambulist gives information about things of which she has no conception when she is awake. Therefore in the composer, more than in any other artist, the man is entirely separate and distinct from the artist.

As a composer I might class myself as a Neo-Romantic, inasmuch as I have always regarded music as a highly personal and emotional form of expression. I like to write music which takes its inspiration from poetry, art and nature. I do not care for purely decorative music. Although I am in sympathy with modern idioms, I abhor music which attempts nothing more than the illustration of a stylistic fad. And in using modern techniques, I have tried at all times to subjugate them to a larger idea or a grander human feeling.

One day I’ll be able to relax a bit, and try and become a good composer.

Pianists call me a composer, composers call me a pianist. The classicists think me a futurist, and the futurists call me a reactionary.

When I listen to a symphony I love, I don’t get from it what the composer got. His ‘Yes’ was different from mine. He could have no concern for mine and no exact conception of it. That answer is too personal to each man. But in giving himself what he wanted, he gave me a great experience.

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