Quotes About Composition

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

The flesh of prose gets its shape and strength from the bones of grammar.

If you write short, crisp sentences without any sinces or whens or althoughs, try stringing varied sentences together by using subordinate conjunctions. If you already rely on subordinate conjunctions, try rebalancing your sentences with ands and buts and fors and sos. Does the change of conjunctions change your style?

We humans may think of ourselves as solid objects, all flesh and bone. But take a close look, and it's clear our bodies are composed largely of oxygen and hydrogen. We are essentially ephemeral – akin as much to wind water, and fire as to earth.

A composition that we do not understand or like appears to expand in time as we experience it, yet vanishes almost immediately from memory.

The atmosphere is only about .035 percent carbon dioxide,

The only happy talkers are dandies who extract pleasure from the very perishability of their material and who would not be able to tolerate the isolation of all other forms of composition; for most good talkers, when they have run down, are miserable; they know that they have betrayed themselves, that they have taken material which should have a life of its own, to dispense it in noises upon the air.

When I write a tune - and it's been like this for many years - I always hear in the back of my head some sort of vague, orchestrated, fully fleshed-out big-band version of the song with other parts going on.

On 'Metallica,' I recorded six or seven different guitar solos for almost every song, took the best aspects of each solo, mapped out a master solo and made a composite. Then I learned how to play the composite solo, tightened it up and replayed it for the final version.

Classical musicians do this all the time. They want perfection. So they piece things together. Eight bars of this and six bars of that. Glenn Gould said that with a recording he wanted to make perfect versions of pieces.

A song versus an album is not like a scene versus a play.

I like to think that my works flow like music. That may be one reason I work in large groups versus one picture of one thing; it's the flow of the whole series that counts.

If you're using live bass versus orchestral bass, you've got to make sure that you're not stepping on the toes of the other elements, so you've got to balance it out.

I write in a very strange way. Things are very fragmentary for a very long time, and then they come together very quickly near the end of the process.

I bring up 'The Heist,' and you can almost cut that record down the middle between songs where the beat came first and the words came second, and songs where the words came first and the beat came second. It can start with a vibe, a beat that drives a story, or it can start with a story and then trying to identify the tone to tell that story right.

When I write a song, that process is sort of entwined with a lyric or a chord progression that suits the vibe, and that'll work off each other.

If you can say the lyrics almost like a poem and they stand up, that's a great thing. Some songs have great lyrics and I don't like the melodies, and vice versa.

I love writing music for film and TV, but putting it into a video game is twice as fun because it needs to be repeatable and joyous.

I used to compose a lot of music for video games, before I got into movies, and I am slowly getting back to it.

Videos are more like photography. It's not as much about trying to tell a story as it is creating images.

Don't bother looking at the view - I have already composed it.

A journalist is supposed to present an unbiased portrait of an event, a view devoid of intimate emotions. This is impossible, of course. The framing of an image, by its very composition, represents a choice. The photographer chooses what to show and what to exclude.

Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.

A poem is like a score for the human voice.