Quotes About Composers

For many years, I've always been attached to what they call the Great American Songbook, and Kern was a great leader of that because he had the classical training of Europe. He impressed all the greatest composers, like Cole Porter and Gershwin. They couldn't believe he was writing the songs he was writing.

In the beginning, many composers didn't have confidence in me. It's not their fault. It only comes after you've delivered your first hit.

Chopin, Schubert, and Liszt had no idea of how to write for the piano.

Since music is a reflection of our mindset and our culture, it is bound to change with time. I am glad that India is such a receiving country and is always open to all kinds of music. Our composers, singers and writers are open to experimenting.

The record company started as an adjunct to that, to give young composers their first recorded performances; to give young musicians their first debut on a recording. These are all things that big record companies would never touch because there is no money in it!

It's amazing how fast generations lose sight of other generations. One of the first things the young composers who come to work with me say is that they want to write music people will like, instead of gaining their credentials by being rejected by the audience.

All composers who came after were influenced by Beethoven, even during his lifetime, both by his personality and by his music. He was a father figure for generations.

What inspires me is not so much the music as the opportunity to interact with composers. I think that has driven everything I've done.

One of the advantages I've had as an interpreter - because I'm not a composer - is I've had the fortune of working with great composers. Armando Manzanero, Rafael Perez Botija, Manuel Alejandro. These are the people who have built my career.

Nobody can give a good performance unless the authors and composers have written a good part, a fact which is often overlooked.

Composers now just don't have the depth of inspiration for melody. Most of the lyrics of the pop songs you hear today are repetitious. They're almost nursery rhymes, as if written by children - which they are.

In America, at the beginning of talkies, they pulled Fred Astaire from the theaters and put him on the screen and had all of these great composers write songs for him. They call it the Great American Songbook; I call it the Fred Astaire Songbook because they were written for him.

Well, the very best operas are the ones written by the very best composers.

It's true that many of the best-known composers were German or Austrian, but we should remember how good the music tradition is in Britain, too, because it has an informality and a fluidity that should really be celebrated.

Composers and lyricists are not responsible for storyline and casting. One can imagine actors shouldering this responsibility, since they charge for half the film. But producers never ask actors to share the losses. Instead, they train their guns on composers and lyricists.

I'm a born music lover and want to sing for all music composers as well but due to some false impression many makers feel that I prefer to make my own music and sing, though I'm equally comfortable in both.

It's good that Bollywood is changing and directors are trying out Pakistani singers as composers.

I think that live shows are more important for singers than composers, because composers still get a lot of recognition as compared to a singer.

I feel blessed and lucky that some of the film industry's most magical and iconic songs where legendary composers and singers have collaborated have been filmed on me.

Although the civil-rights movement did a lot to change how black life was dramatized on the American stage in the fifties and sixties, white composers and lyricists often still rely on familiar tropes when it comes to representing black women in musicals.

Communists love to make films about composers, because composers compose music and don't talk subversive things.

On my mental iPod, I always have Stravinsky and Ravel.

I am a very choosy guy, sometimes it gets very irritating for composers. If I don't feel it, then I am not able to perform.

Mom could not ignore the sorts of people who were most certainly not fundamentalist: the artists, composers, and choreographers she so admired, or the sorts of secular people she might bump into at concerts and in museums. So I think my mother spent a lifetime trying to change the image of Bible-believing Christians.