Quotes by Composers - Page 2

Wagner has lovely moments but awful quarters of an hour.
Gioacchino Rossini
One cannot judge 'Lohengrin' from a first hearing and I certainly do not intend to hear it a second time.
Gioacchino Rossini
A nation creates music - the composer only arranges it.
Mikhail Glinka
Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra not choreography to the audience.
George Szell
Jazz is about the only form of art existing today in which there is freedom of the individual without the loss of group contact.
Dave Brubeck
Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.
Ornette Coleman
Jazz will endure just as long as people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.
John Philip Sousa
Mozart is sunshine.
Antonin Dvorak
Never compose anything unless the not composing of it becomes a positive nuisance to you.
Gustav Hoist
Nothing is better than music.... It has done more for us than we have the right to hope for.
Nadia Boulanger
Rests always sound well.
Arnold Schoenberg
The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former the music is always graver than its performance - whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being played.
Andre Previn
The Sonata is an essentially dramatic art form combining the emotional range in vivid presentation of a full-size stage drama with the terseness of a short story.
Donald Francis Tovey
The sonatas of Mozart are unique they are too easy for children and too difficult for artists.
Artur Schnabel
Let us not forget that the greatest composers were also the greatest thieves. They stole from everyone and everywhere.
Pablo Casals
Discord occasions a momentary distress to the ear which remains unsatisfied and even uneasy until it hears something better.
Charles Burney
Discord occasions a momentary distress to the ear which remains unsatisfied and even uneasy until it hears something better. I am convinced...that provided the ear be at length made amends there are few dissonances too strong for it. Disharmony to paraphrase Bergson's statement about disorder is simply a harmony to which many are unaccustomed.
John Cage
He was dying all his life.
Hector Berlioz
I am sure my music has a taste of codfish in it.
Edvard Grieg
In the Negro melodies of America I find all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.
Antonin Dvorak
Jazz came to America 300 years ago in chains.
Paul Whiteman
Beethoven can write music thank God - but he can do nothing else on earth.
Ludwig van Beethoven
The public doesn't want new music the main thing that it demands of a composer is that he be dead.
Arthur Honegger
I searched through rebellion drugs diets mysticism religions intellectu-alism and much more only to begin to find ... that truth is basically simple-and feels good clean and right.
Chick Corea
They say you should not suffer through the past. You should be able to wear it like a loose garment take it off and let it drop.
Eva Jessye
It is one thing to be gifted and quite another thing to be worthy of one's own gift.
Nadia Boulanger
Epigram: a wisecrack that has played Carnegie Hall.
Oscar Levant
Every time I look at you I get a fierce desire to be lonesome.
Oscar Levant
He who is the most slow in making a promise is the most faithful in the performance of it.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
I'm a concert pianist. That's a pretentious way of saying I'm unemployed at the moment.
Oscar Levant
One must not hold one's self so divine as to be unwilling occasionally to make improvements in one's creations.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Perfection is no more a requisite to art than to heroes.
Ned Rorem
Den I wish I was in Dixie Hooray! Hooray! In Dixie Land I'll take my stand To lib and die in Dixie.
Daniel D. Emmett
It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else.
John Cage
All that time is lost which might be better employed.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
We are involved in a life that passes understanding: our highest business is our daily life.
John Cage
Slow motion gets you there faster.
Hoagy Carmichael
I am an arrogant and impatient listener but in the case of a few composers a very few when I hear a work I do not like I am convinced that it is my own fault. Verdi is one of those composers.
Benjamin Britten
If a literary man puts together two words about music one of them will be wrong.
Aaron Copland
Music is given to us specifically to make order of things to move from an anarchic individualistic state to a regulated perfectly concious one which alone insures vitality and durability.
Igor Stravinsky
Music should strike fire from the heart of man and bring tears from the eyes of woman.
Beethoven
How wonderful opera would be if there were no singers.
Gioacchino Rossini
Music is your own experience your thoughts your wisdom. If you don't live it it won't come out of your horn.
Charlie Parker
The function of pop music is to be consumed.
Pierre Boulez
I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the varieties of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.
Igor Stravinsky
The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes - ah that is where the art resides!
Artur Schnabel
I write as a sow piddles.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.
Igor Stravinsky
Throughout my career nervousness and stage-fright have never left me before playing. And each of the thousands of concerts I have played at I feel as bad as I did the very first time.
Pablo Casals
Wagner has lovely moments but awful quarters of an hour.
Gioacchino Rossini
One cannot judge 'Lohengrin' from a first hearing and I certainly do not intend to hear it a second time.
Gioacchino Rossini
A nation creates music - the composer only arranges it.
Mikhail Glinka
Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra not choreography to the audience.
George Szell
Jazz is about the only form of art existing today in which there is freedom of the individual without the loss of group contact.
Dave Brubeck
Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.
Ornette Coleman
Jazz will endure just as long as people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.
John Philip Sousa
Mozart is sunshine.
Antonin Dvorak
Never compose anything unless the not composing of it becomes a positive nuisance to you.
Gustav Hoist
Nothing is better than music.... It has done more for us than we have the right to hope for.
Nadia Boulanger
Rests always sound well.
Arnold Schoenberg