Composer Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Composer

Composer Quotes & Sayings

Happy to read and share the best inspirational Composer quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.

I listen only to Bach, Beethoven or Mozart. Life is too short to waste on other composers. — John Edensor Littlewood

Stravinsky the composer I worship. Stravinsky the thinker I despise. — Dmitri Shostakovich

He's not a performer, he's not a composer, he's not even a musician, but Norman Granz is Mr. Jazz. — Oscar Peterson

A composer once told me that the silence from which each note emerges is more important than the note itself. — Wayne W. Dyer

I dream of a collaboration that would finally be total, in which the librettist would often think as a composer and the composer as a librettist. — Jacques Ibert

Copland was the first important American classical composer to go to work for Hollywood. — Terry Teachout

She seemed to have apprehended all of the composer's coldness and none of his poetry. — Kate Chopin

I'm trying to interpret the film through the director's head, but it all comes out through me. So, a composer is kind of like a psychic medium. — Danny Elfman

As a composer at a point where I can absolutely pick and choose what I want to do, I don't want to write about anybody I don't care about. — Andrew Lloyd Webber

I'm like any other composer. If you give me five years to write a symphony, I'm still going to be asking for more time two days before it's due. — Darren Criss

The only reason I am successful is because I have stayed true to myself. — Lindsey Stirling

Freddie Bryant is a brilliant young guitarist and composer. — Kenny Burrell

Composition is notation of distortion of what composers think they've heard before. Masterpieces are marvelous misquotations. — Ned Rorem

I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer. — Leonard Bernstein

The most uninteresting part of the biography of a composer is his childhood. All those preludes are the same and the reader hurries on to the fugue. — Dmitri Shostakovich

A poet must be a composer of plots rather than of verses, — Aristotle.

The further the music develops, the more complex the apparatus used by the composer to express his thoughts becomes. — Gustav Mahler

It's not a special taste. An American composer should have something to say to a cab driver. — Morton Gould

Handel is the greatest composer that ever lived ... I would uncover my head and kneel down on his tomb. — Ludwig Van Beethoven

We all think we are actors, given our scripts. But really? You're the playwright. You're the composer. — David Levithan

As a major contemporary composer, Madonna should not let the eye dictate to the ear. — Camille Paglia

Is there a meaning to music? Yes. Can you state in so many words what the meaning is? No. — Aaron Copland

There is no doubt that the first requirement for a composer is to be dead. — Arthur Honegger

Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune. — Leonard Bernstein

One day I'll be able to relax a bit, and try and become a good composer. — Benjamin Britten

I've always been a composer dependent on texts. — David Del Tredici

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

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

Composers often think in terms of music and not of an instrument itself. — Michala Petri

It doesn't necessarily mean at all that the composer plays his own works best. — Leo Ornstein

The composer opens the cage door for arithmetic, the draftsman gives geometry its freedom. — Jean Cocteau

Of all composers, past and present, I am the least learned. I mean that in all seriousness, and by learning I do not mean knowledge of music. — Giuseppe Verdi

The three greatest composers are Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. All the others are cretins. — Hans Von Bulow

I know of only one composer who measures up to Beethoven, and that is Bruckner. — Richard Wagner

I think it's good for the composer to teach because you always have new students and you have to begin at the beginning and make things clear. — John Corigliano

You can't have Bach, Mozart and Beethoven as your favorite composers. They simply define what music is! — Michael Tilson Thomas

We consider Monteverdi the first composer of opera. There was someone before, but everything started with Monteverdi. — Cecilia Bartoli

You are lyricist, me a composer - you and I make a complete song. — Alexandra Monir

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

The composer ... joins Heaven and Earth with threads of sounds. — Alan Hovhaness

Remember always that the composer's pen is still mightier than the bow of the violinist; in you lie all the possibilities of the creation of beauty. — John Philip Sousa

I love Philip Glass' work, not only as a film composer but also as a musician. The film score work that he does always amazes and shocks me. — Park Chan-wook

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

A burst of Beethoven that would have made the composer glad he was deaf erupted from her i-Phone. — Ian Simpson

This music, transmitted by loud-speakers, made a masterpiece appear like an amateurish attempt at composition by nimcompoop — Paul Hindemith

I'm glad I won it because when I grew up the Pulitzer was the award that every composer wanted and I was like that too. — John Corigliano

I don't think a guy that really has no understanding about people, or has no interest in understanding people would make a good film composer. — Stanley Clarke

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. — Benjamin Britten

An artist, as much as a writer or composer, needed themes, needed ideas. — Hanya Yanagihara

I've been very fortunate as a composer to be involved with projects that have really propelled my scores forward. I'm very proud of it. — Alan Menken

As a composer, Dylan now fits comfortably alongside George Gershwin or Irving Berlin, though he grumpily refuses to wear any man's collar. — Douglas Brinkley

To be a success as a Broadway composer, you must be Jewish or gay. I'm both. — Leonard Bernstein

A composer's job involves the decoration of fragments of time. — Frank Zappa

Music could unlock things in you, could transport you to somewhere even the composer hadn't predicted. — Jojo Moyes

I've been called a minimalist composer for more than 30 years, and while I've never really agreed with the description, I've gotten used to it. — Philip Glass

I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer. — Richard Strauss

The composers hated me. The singers detested me. The guitarists were terrified by me. — Bulat Okudzhava

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

To be a great composer requires immense experience ... One acquires this by listening not only to other men's work, but above all to one's own! — Frederic Chopin

The modern composer is a madman who persists in manufacturing an article which nobody wants. — Arthur Honegger

To find a new British composer who is really good is rare. — Tim Rice

The modern composer builds upon the foundation of truth. — Claudio Monteverdi

What do you think happens to a composer who is sincere and loves to write and has to wait thirty years to have someone play a piece of his music? — Charles Mingus

To make a film, the final big collaborator that you have is the composer. — Paul Thomas Anderson

I am a composer, horn player, and computer programmer. — Robert Patterson

I was in the army, and I had given up the thought of being a composer. — Mitch Leigh

The negative is the equivalent of the composer's score, and the print the performance. — Ansel Adams

I am but an architectural composer. — Alexander Jackson Davis

I don't really call myself a composer. — Caroline Shaw

I am an interpreter of music rather than a composer of it. — Sarah Brightman

I always work with the same composer, his name is Ali Helnwein. I don't have a musical background. — Alex Prager

It's understanding the intention of a composer that allows a producer and an arranger to make those moments speak. — Michael Bolton

In chamber music, the audience can hear each instrument and understand (and feel) what the composer and the musicians have in mind as they play. — Karen DeCrow

I'm really grateful. But I never had the rock star dream. I thought it would be cool to be a modern-day composer. — Julian Casablancas

Good music resembles something. It resembles the composer. — Jean Cocteau

Since Mozart's day composers have learned the art of making music throatily and palpitatingly sexual. — Aldous Huxley

What is music about? You can't listen to one era, one composer, and know what music is about. — Twyla Tharp

Any subject is good for opera if the composer feels it so intently he must sing it out. — Gian Carlo Menotti

The thing about influence is that any composer worth anything will give you the same names. — Harrison Birtwistle

I'm not an architectural composer. — Harrison Birtwistle

You are the composer and conductor and thus decide what key of life to live. I choose major over minor whenever I can. — Susan Reynolds

I'm not an intellectual composer. — Les Baxter

I am not a composer of music; I sing pieces which have been written for me which gives me bigger freedom to search for pieces I want to record. — Sarah Brightman

I think a composer is always interested in his last work. — Gyorgy Ligeti

John Barry was the first film composer I was aware of. As a teenager I owned several of his Bond soundtracks. — Carter Burwell

Music is not written in red, white and blue. It is written in the heart's blood of the composer. — Nellie Melba

Wagner is a composer who has beautiful moments but awful quarter hours. — Gioachino Rossini

I'm into horror pictures because I love the fear of being alone in the dark, and I'd recommend that to any composer who wants to work in this genre. — Christopher Young

Wherever there's a conductor, you're sure to find a dead composer! — Daniel Handler

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

When you're making video, you're giving structure to time, which is what a composer does. — Bill Viola

The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways. — Ansel Adams

My mother, Minuetta Kessler, was a concert pianist and composer who performed at Carnegie Hall and Town Hall. — Ronald Kessler

I think it's very good music composed by a human composer and sung by two birds with two feet and no feathers! — Alexandre Dumas

Sidney Poitier and Sidney Lumet were instrumental in helping me get started as the first black composer to get name credit for movie scores. — Quincy Jones

The present day composer refuses to die. — Edgard Varese

The challenge to the improvisor is to get permanence into his spontaneity. The challenge to the composer is to get spontaneity into his permanence. — Barry Finnerty

The ability to understand and deliver comedy and tragedy is extremely rare in one composer. — Signe Baumane

I was offered a few shows, but the money didn't work out, but I'm not very keen on judging such shows. I'm happy in my space as a composer. — Pritam Chakraborty

'Neverwhere,' by Benjamin Millepied, is set to his favorite composer, Nico Muhly. — Robert Gottlieb