Quotes About Composition

I write a lot of music in my time off and I compose most of the songs on guitar. I've actually gone into the studio and recorded a few things, but it's tough trying to sell a song. It's all about finding that hook, that melody.

You don't just go to the studio and say, 'I'm going to write a hit.' It becomes a hit when people like your compositions.

Many music directors have studios at home.

I went to study some orchestration stuff because I got so inspired working with all the orchestras.

I believe so, but at first he must know. He must know in which spirit Beethoven has composed this piece. He must try to study that. And he must find out in which station of life of Beethoven he did.

Music is made up out of these building blocks. Studying how these blocks go together and what they consist of and the math of how it works - it's all the same stuff; it's just different aesthetics that we're talking about.

My background in music is classical - I did graduate school in music. At that time, I was studying composition, but I was studying classical guitar very seriously.

I'm studying musical arts, all the way to composition. But I'm also studying theater arts, stage directing and acting.

We're not just any star stuff, most of which is humdrum hydrogen and listless helium. Our bodies include fancier ingredients like carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous, and a few other herbs and spices.

There has to be the right pacing of images to tell the story. I'm always stunned at how little you can put in.

That was one of the big problems when I was at Harvard studying music. We had to write choral pieces in the style of Brahms or Mendelssohn, which was distressing because in the end you realized how good Brahms is, and how bad you are.

What I'm trying to say is that within the styles, first, there's something clear: the style is given by the players on the roster.

I take in a lot of different styles when I listen to music, but when I'm actually writing a song it comes from a very stripped back place that focuses on melody and soaring choruses that lift-off.

Yes, but more than being a designer, I'm more of a stylist, because I don't sew and I don't sketch, but I'm good at putting things together, choosing things that are chic and glossing over the aesthetics of things.

Writing music - particularly music without lyrics - calls almost exclusively on the subconscious.

Music has no subject beyond the combinations of notes we hear, for music speaks not only by means of sounds, it speaks nothing but sound.

What I end up shooting is the situation. I shoot the composition and my subject is going to help the composition or not.

My operas usually come from musical ideas rather than ideas about subject matter.

Listening to the stories my colleagues are researching and grappling with - in terms of access to documents, psychological understanding of their subjects, artful composition and determination to extrapolate from an individual's life lessons and insights that we can all learn from - I am each time overwhelmed by joy.

The well-known fact that the form of a specific substance, e.g. water, and hence its properties can alter without a change in composition was disposed of by the formal view that a physical, not a chemical, process was involved.

The entire substance of the spleen at an early period is almost entirely composed of nuclei and granular matter.

The music is the emotional substance of the show; the book just sets it up. Nobody goes to a musical to hear the book. That's the way it works.

What gets people into trouble with records now is that they want to build something up without substantial musical ideas. Without that as a foundation, you can add all the layers of sound you want - it's still going to sound like a mess.

A very subtle difference can make the picture or not.