Quotes by Composers - Page 14

Realized dreams often turn into nightmares.
Lera Auerbach
Of all the arts, music is really the most abstract.
Leo Ornstein
I would say that Op 31 had brought music just to the very edge … I just simply drew back and said, “beyond that lies complete chaos”.
Leo Ornstein
If you would dance, my pretty Count, I'll play the tune on my little guitar..
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
I never liked hearing anyone say I was the new George Gershwin, because I knew I could have never even carried that man's music case. If George Gershwin hadn't died when he was thirty-nine years old, there is no knowing how much more great music he would have written.
Burt Bacharach
I'll admit that writing doesn't always come, but I'm totally against walking around looking at the sky when you're experiencing a block, waiting for inspiration to strike you. Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov didn't like each other and agreed on very few things, but they were of one opinion on this: you had to write constantly. If you can't write a major work, write minor trifles. If you can't write at all, orchestrate something.
Dmitri Shostakovich
First you learn the instrument, then you learn the music, then you forget all that s**t and just play.
Charlie Parker
Jazz is the assassination, the murdering, the slaying of syncopation. I would even go so far as to confess that we are musical anarchists.
Nick La Rocca
Sometimes it's to your advantage for people to think you're crazy.
Thelonious Sphere Monk
Music begins where the possibilities of language end
Jean Sibelius
And another thing about German symphonic development: [it's] just like German philosophy, all worked out and systematized. When a German thinks, he reasons his way to a conclusion. Our Russian brother, on the other hand, starts with a conclusion and then might amuse himself with reasoning. Just keep one thing in mind. The creative act carries within itself its own aesthetic laws. When an artist revises, it means he is dissatisfied. When he revises what is already satisfying, he is Germanizing, chewing over what has [already] been said. We Russians are not cud chewers; we are omnivores!
Modest Mussorgsky
I want to go and write music that announces to you that you can feel something. I don’t want to tell you what to feel, but I just want you to have the possibility of feeling something.
Hans Zimmer
Music embodies feeling without forcing it to contend and combine with thought, as it is forced in most arts and especially in the art of words.
Franz Liszt
Trends of the times be damned.
Robert Glasper
With a heart filled with endless love for those who scorned me, I wandered far away. For many and many a year I sang songs. Whenever I tried to sing of love, it turned to pain. And again, when I tried to sing of pain, it turned to love.
Franz Schubert
There are mornings when, from the first ray of light seized upon by the eye, and the first simple sounds that get inside the head, the heart is convinced that it is existing in rhythm to a kind of unheard music, familiar but forgotten because long ago it was interrupted and only now has suddenly resumed playing. The silent melodies pass through the fabric of the consciousness like the wind through the meshes of a net, without moving it, but at the same time unmistakably there, all around it. For one who has never lived such a morning, its advent can be a paralyzing experience.
Paul Bowles
Plenty of masterpieces are just one cliché after another, Mozart for example, but that's quite natural, because if you think about it, two clichés that have never met each other before can beget the most original and profound effect.
Thomas Ades
Music is the final piece of filmmaking—the essential element that pulls emotion from an audience and puts the goosebumps on the screen.
Artie Kane
If somebody tells you a rule, break it. That's the only way to move things forward.
Hans Zimmer
I tell you before God, and as an honest man, your son (W A Mozart)is the greatest composer known to me by person and repute, he has taste and what is more the greatest skill in composition.
Joseph Haydn
If somebody tells you there's a rule, break it.
Hans Zimmer
There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law. I love music passionately. And because l love it, I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it. It is a free art gushing forth — an open-air art, boundless as the elements, the wind, the sky, the sea. It must never be shut in and become an academic art.
Claude Debussy
A digital sound sample in angry rap doesn't correspond to the graffiti but the wall.
Jaron Lanier
For the most basic assumption that dictated my early attempts to respond to creative music commentary was the mistaken belief that western journalists had some fundamental understanding of black creativity—or even western creativity—but this assumption was seriously in error.
Anthony Braxton
I tell you before God, and as an honest man, your son is the greatest composer known to me by person and repute, he has taste and what is more the greatest skill in composition." (Said to Leopold Mozart)
Joseph Haydn
My teacher, Ben Johnston, was convinced that our tuning is responsible for much of our cultural psychology, the fact that we are so geared toward progress and action and violence and so little attuned to introspection, contentment, and acquiescence. Equal temperament could be described as the musical equivalent to eating a lot of red meat and processed sugars and watching violent action films. The music doesn't turn your attention inward, it makes you want to go out and work off your nervous energy on something.
Kyle Gann
Brahms' Variations are better than mine, but mine were written before his.
Franz Liszt
With the new technology that keeps entering the media, film composers are constantly being placed in new learning situations. Acknowledging this and realizing that one must keep up, I maintain, nonetheless, that the real creative power is in the mind and heart of the composer.
Henry Mancini
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.
Thelonious Monk
There is no doubt that even the greatest musical geniuses have sometimes worked without inspiration. This guest (inspiration) does not always respond to the first invitation. We must always work, and a self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood. If we wait for the mood, without endeavouring to meet it half-way, we easily become indolent and apathetic. We must be patient, and believe that inspiration will come to those who can master their disinclination.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Kalkbrenner has made me an offer; that I should study with him for three years, and he will make something really - really out of me. I answered that I know how much I lack; but that I cannot exploit him, and three years is too much. But he has convinced me that I can play admirably when I am in the mood, and badly when I am not; a thing which never happens to him. After close examination he told me that I have no school; that I am on an excellent road, but can slip off the track. That after his death, or when he finally stops playing, there will be no representative of the great piano-forte school. That even if I wish it, I cannot build up a new school without knowing the old one; in a word : that I am not a perfected machine, and that this hampers the flow of my thoughts. That I have a mark in composition; that it would be a pity not to become what I have the promise of being...
Frédéric Chopin
nothing is accomplished by writing a piece of musicnothing is accomplished by hearing a piece of musicnothing is accomplished by playing a piece of musicour ears are now in excellent condition.
John Cage
You can kill people with sound. And if you can kill, then maybe there is also the sound that is opposite of killing. And the distance between these two points is very big. And you are free--you can choose. In art everything is possible, but everything is not necessary.
Arvo Pärt
What is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposeless or a purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life--not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.
John Cage
I am in the world only for the purpose of composing.
Franz Schubert
If, while at the piano, you attempt to form little melodies, that is very well; but if they come into your mind of themselves, when you are not practising, you may be still more pleased; for the internal organ of music is then roused in you. The fingers must do what the head desires; not the contrary.
Robert Schumann
We stood there for a minute or two, with John swaying gently against my arm. 'I'm feeling better,' he announced. Then he looked up at the stars. 'Wow..' he intoned. 'Look at that! Isn't that amazing?".I followed his gaze. The stars did look good but they didn't look that good. It was very unlike John to be over the top in that way. I stared at him. He was wired-pin-sharp and quivering, resonating away like a human tuning fork.No sooner had John uttered his immortal words about the stars than George and Paul came bursting out on the roof. They had come tearing up from the studio as soon as they found out where we were. They knew why John was feeling unwell. Maybe everyone else did, too - everyone except for father-figure George Martin here!It was very simple. John was tripping on LSD. He had taken it by mistake, they said - he had meant to take an amphetamine tablet. That hardly made any difference, frankly; the fact was that John was only too likely to imagine he could fly, and launch himself off the low parapet that ran around the roof. They had been absolutely terrified that he might do so. I spoke to Paul about this night many years later, and he confirmed that he and George had been shaken rigid when they found out we were up on the roof. They knew John was having a what you might call a bad trip. John didn't go back to Weybridge that night; Paul took him home to his place, in nearby Cavendish Road. They were intensely close, remember, and Paul would do almost anything for John. So, once they were safe inside, Paul took a tablet of LSD for the first time, 'So I could get with John' as he put it- be with him in his misery and fear.What about that for friendship?
George Martin
The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, 'Is there a meaning to music?' My answer would be, 'Yes.' And 'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?' My answer to that would be, 'No'.
Aaron Copland
Music without the ebb and flow would be like "watching a film with only good guys in it." -attrib Frank Zappa
John Powell
Jazz will endure as long as people hear it through their feet instead of their brains
John Philip Sousa
People usually complain that music is so ambiguous, and what they are supposed to think when they hear it is so unclear, while words are understood by everyone. But for me it is exactly the opposite...what the music I love expresses to me are thoughts not to indefinite for words, but rather too definite.
Felix Mendelssohn
Play always as if in the presence of a master.
Robert Schumann
The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.
Johann Sebastian Bach
No second chances in the land of a thousand dances, the valley of ten million insanities.
Ry Cooder
The piano ain't got no wrong notes.
Thelonious Monk
Which is more musical, a truck passing by a factory or a truck passing by a music school?Are the people inside the school musical and the ones outside unmusical?What if the ones inside can't hear very well, would that change my question?
John Cage
I've never known a musician who regretted being one. Whatever deceptions life may have in store for you, music itself is not going to let you down.
Virgil Thomson
Strange how potent cheap music is.
Noël Coward
Anyone who tells a lie has not a pure heart, and cannot make a good soup.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Jazz is not just 'Well, man, this is what I feel like playing.' It's a very structured thing that comes down from a tradition and requires a lot of thought and study.
Wynton Marsalis
The Universe is making music all the time.
Tom Waits
For the record, folks; I never took a shit on stage and the closest I ever came to eating shit anywhere was at a Holiday Inn buffet in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in 1973.
Frank Zappa
The new kind of music seems to create not from the heart but from the head. Its composers think rather than feel. They have not the capacity to make their works exalt - they meditate, protest, analyze, reason, calculate and brood, but they do not exalt.
Sergei Rachmaninoff
It's easy to play any musical instrument: all you have to do is touch the right key at the right time and the instrument will play itself.
Johann Sebastian Bach
In every colour there's the light.In every stone sleeps a crystal.Remember the Shaman, when he used to say:Man is the dream of the dolphin
Enigma
What's even worse than a flute? - Two flutes!
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
The emotions - love, mirth, the heroic, wonder, tranquility, fear, anger, sorrow, disgust - are in the audience.
John Cage
We're just two lost souls Swimming in a fish bowl, Year after year, Running over the same old ground. What have we found? The same old fears. Wish you were here.
Roger Waters
The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.
Tom Waits
All that you touch All that you see All that you taste All you feel. All that you love All that you hate All you distrust All you save. All that you give All that you deal All that you buy, beg, borrow or steal. All you create All you destroy All that you do All that you say. All that you eat And everyone you meet All that you slight And everyone you fight. All that is now All that is gone All that's to come and everything under the sun is in tune but the sun is eclipsed by the moon. "There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact it's all dark.
Roger Waters