Quotes About Composition

This making studies and then taking them home to use them is only half right. You get composition, but you lose freshness; you miss the subtle and, to the artist, the finer characteristics of the scene itself.

Karlheinz Stockhausen.

A novel is a piece of prose of a certain length with something wrong with it.

Teaching English and teaching Writing are two separate things.

If measure and symmetry are absent from any composition in any degree, ruin awaits both the ingredients and the composition... Measure and symmetry are beauty and virtue the world over.

The essence of beauty is unity in variety.

Beauty is the harmony of purpose and form.

Color contributes to beauty, but it is not beauty. Color should have a minor part in the consideration of beauty, because it is not color but the structure that constitutes its essence.

I often look for beauty in form and structure, and for ideas.

You must have a visual sense if you want to be a photographer. It is a very subtle thing, this visual business.

Beautiful forms and compositions are not made by chance, nor can they ever, in any material, be made at small expense.

There is a better chance of getting an exciting painting from a laboured study with texture than from a fine drawing without it.

By the light of a candle, he composed a letter, saying everything as briefly as possible:

Beethoven's "Leonore Overture.

I am three notes in the middle of a song.

I don't really focus on if what I'm writing is pop or not. I just write music and then I try to figure out how to arrange the things that I write.

My songs are more arrangements than they are songs.

I've found in composing that being simple and profound—having in-depthness in your music—is the most difficult thing to do. Anybody can write a whole lot of notes, which may or may not say something . . . But why make it complicated for the musicians to play? Why make it difficult for the listeners to hear?

I sometimes talk about the making of a poem within the poem.

Outlines can help, but not if you begin with them. If you begin, instead, by writing down everything, by spewing out your ideas as fast as you can type, you will discover the answer to the first question: the fragments you have to work with are the various things you have just written.

As Aristotle observed, "A beautiful object, whether it be a living organism or any whole composed of parts, must not only have an orderly arrangement of parts, but must also be of a certain magnitude; for beauty depends on magnitude and order.

Again we take our cue from Strunk and White: "Before beginning to compose something, gauge the nature and extent of the enterprise, and work from a suitable design…

Reading the Koran on its own terms, trying to interpret it without resorting to commentaries, is a difficult and questionable exercise because of the nature of the text-its allusive and referential style and its grammatical and logical discontinuities, as well as our lack of sure information about its origins and the circumstances of its composition. Often such a reading seems arbitrary and necessarily inconclusive. G. R. Hawting

Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.