Quotes About Composer

A singer whose ear is singly directed to the melodic aspects of a Brahms lied or a Verdi aria lacks perception of the musical web from which the melodic line emerges; the composer's intent may remain unrealized. to sing Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Wolf, or Strauss lieder without an understanding of underlying harmonic structures is to vocalize on them, not to conceive of them musically and emotionally.

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

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

Bruckner he is my man!

L'homme, guidé par le sens de la beauté, transforme l'évènement fortuit (une musique de Beethoven, une mort dans une gare) en un motif qui va ensuite s'inscrire dans la partition de sa vie. Il y reviendra, le répétera, le modifiera, le développera comme fait le compositeur avec le thème de sa sonate.

I shall always respect the composer. If I embellish, it is his idea I am embellishing.

I find respect for a mediocre British composer, as opposed to a really good American, ridiculous because they automatically respect a composer if he's from England.

I wanted to be a film composer because I heard scores that could stand alone, from 'Vertigo' to 'Star Wars' to 'La Dolce Vita,' because this music has so much history. They're weighed with the history of music. They come from somewhere, they have a past.

Rachmaninov has some kind of weird dark edge to his music which I don't think I've heard with any other kind of music before.

I tried to score a few films with this composer Brian Reitzell here in L.A. We made a bunch of music we really loved, but we got fired from the film for being too weird.

I've been kind of listening to the composer Britten and his rendition of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.' The opening track is a choral section where all the weird fairies, who are played by kids in the production, sing. It's a crazy opening melody and chord sequence - really amazing.

When dubstep was big, Ubisoft told the composer for 'Far Cry 3' to make dubstep and to me that was really weird.

In a way, the highest praise you could give to a composer like Bach was to take and make your own arrangement; it was sort of an homage to that composer and to his work, so it wasn't considered sacrilegious to do something like that.

Stravinsky is masterly: his harmony is conceived so precisely that it can only be the way it is.

Ramesh Vinayakam is a maestro music composer and a dear friend, too.

I feel like there is a different, new energy when I collaborate with a living artist, whether it be a composer, designer, lighting designer. I love that process.

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.

My entire family are in music and my father was a classical singer, teacher and composer.

When my opera Plump Jack was performed in 1989, my first piano teacher sent me something that I'd composed when I was four. I remember I played it, and it still sounded like me. I'm the same composer I was then.

I don't think that Prokofiev ever treated me seriously as a composer; he considered only Stravinsky a rival and never missed a chance to take a shot at him. I remember once he started telling me some vile story about Stravinsky. I cut him off.

Stravinsky is one of the greatest composers of our time and I truly love many of his works. (...) The marvellous composer has invariably been at the centre of my attention, and I not only studied and listened to his music, but I played it and made my own transcriptions as well.

Studying Mahler changed many things in my tastes as a composer. Mahler & Berg are my favourite composers even today, as opposed to Hindemith, say, a Krenek and Milhaud whom I liked when I was young but cooled towards rapidly.

Glazunov was the first to convince me that a composer must make the performers submit to his will, and not the other way around (...) The composer must orchestrate in the way he conceived his work, and not simplify his orchestration to please the performers.

The Death of Boris,' by Mussorgsky?