Quotes About Composers

I like Bach. I like Randy Newman.

I think I've learned more about Baroque music than any other genre.

In Germany, people feel like they own classical music, that it is somehow theirs. Over there, everyone still learns to play, and the great composers don't seem alien.

If we want to share the message of the composers, to give good things back to humanity, we have to dig deep while we can.

I'm blessed to be working with wizards like Vishal Bhardwaj as well as many young composers.

In a fit at the bookstore one day, I bought all my favourite composers' biographies: Schubert, Massenet, Wolf. I've still not had a chance to read them; it breaks my heart. But when you travel so much, you just can't take that many books with you.

I think that what's been holding composers back a great deal is that they feel they must have a new style every year. This, in my case, would be hopeless. In fact, it is said that I have no style at all, but that doesn't matter. I just go on doing, as they say, my thing. I believe this takes a certain courage.

Well, American composers are the best composers. At this time in the world, we are where the energy is. We are the most diverse, the most iconoclastic, the most maverick, and the most skillful.

something that will make the hairs of your head stand on end! The function of music is to liberate in the soul those feelings that normally we keep locked up in the heart. The great composers of the past were able to do this, but the musicians of today are satisfied with four notes in a line you can sell on a song-sheet at the street corner. Genius does not find its recognition quite as easily as that, my dear Madame Azaire!

Quincy Jones' autobiography 'Q' is very good. Because he's a master at music, he's one of our greatest composers, and its good for him to have a book and tell the good ole days when he was with Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan and Ray Charles.

I would say, generally speaking, though it is not always the case, comedy is probably the least gratifying for most composers because it is more specific about what the music needs to do.

I know that the classical world has resisted film composers throwing their hat into the classical concert music ring. And you know I don't think that's totally without justification. I think sometimes it seems to me there is a built in automatic prejudice against the whole idea of it. And it's very difficult to overcome that stigma.

Still, American composers working in France have had a pretty hard time.

All great composers of the past spent most of their time studying. Feeling alone won't do the job. A man also needs technique.

Many great composers have died in poverty. I have not faced hardships, like having to struggle for food, thanks to reasonable producers.

As a musician myself, I wouldn't be confident if I received some other composers' song, because I choose to express myself through the music that I make.

My father knew classical music very well. Driving in the car, listening to the radio, he could name every composer, every movement, what piece it was. I was fascinated by the way he recognized who wrote what.

I've got a collection of songs that I've had, I keep adding to and they're all great American composers. I wanted to showcase American composers and I've done that on a lot of my records and played things by American composers that I really respect.

For years, my favorite composers had been Monteverdi and Bach. Then I began to rediscover the 19th century, see it from another perspective.

Some composers end up writing for the guitar as they would write piano music or, more often, harp music. It isn't the same.

I don't think any of the early Romantic composers knew how to write for the piano... The music of that era is full of empty theatrical gestures, full of exhibitionism, and it has a worldly, hedonistic quality that simply turns me off.

I am not one of the great composers. All the great have produced enormously. There is everything in their work - the best and the worst, but there is always quantity. But I have written relatively little.

Classical music is this music that was written by a bunch of dead people a long time ago.

With recording, everything changed. The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one's furniture. It's an idea that many composers have felt reluctant about because it seemed to them to diminish the importance of music.