Quotes About Composition

The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.

You start to think in terms of making an album that might be greater than the sum of its parts. It's sort of like having a lot of footage and then editing it into something that will make sense to a viewer, you know. Sometimes it might involve even working on an older song that might complete that picture.

I am now in the full maturity of my age and vigor of my mind. Persons of various descriptions have repeatedly solicited me to turn my mind to dramatical composition. It was, indeed, the first amusement of my thoughts in my school-boy cell.

In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give your style.

When I did the first 'Oxygene' in the vinyl days, I had a structure in mind divided in 2 parts fitting the A&B sides of an album.

I remember once, when I started writing for the alto saxophone, a saxophonist told me to think of it as being like a cross between an oboe and a viola, but louder.

There was one thing Beethoven didn't do. When one of his string quartets was played, you can believe the second violin wasn't improvising.

The Third Quartet I made the instruments in pairs - Two different pairs - Violin and viola, and violin and cello. They played very different things from each other all through the whole piece.

When I first wrote for orchestra, I didn't realize, when you have 20 people playing a violin line, that is very different than one person playing that line.

I've always listened to music while I write, but none of my work has been so directly impacted by a song as my new novel, 'So Cold the River,' for which the brilliant strings piece 'Short Trip Home,' composed by Edgar Meyer and featuring the incredible Joshua Bell on violin, inspired much of the story.

I was classically trained. But more than just the fact that I play violin, there's a lot of classical elements in the way I write, in the way I hear chords. A lot of times, I think of my songs as a symphony made out of electronics rather than instruments. And I love to do orchestral arrangements of my songs after they're done.

Speed is scarcely the noblest virtue of graphic composition, but it has its curious rewards. There is a sense of getting somewhere fast, which satisfies a native American urge.

The trick to being a novelist is to act like an iceberg. Make it seem as if you're displaying only one-tenth of what you know, and the other nine-tenths isn't visible and never mind if that part is pure styrofoam!

Almost every band has somebody who's the main songwriter and who has a vision, a very clear idea of how a song should be.

There is no field other than the weird in which I have any aptitude or inclination for fictional composition. Life has never interested me so much as the escape from life.

A composition can include an element of improvisation as one of its layers. But jazz improvisation is based on specific codes, which don't allow the possibility to construct multiple layers, to put together different words, to have different rhetorical gestures intact.

Some composers are just interested in music as form. I am much more interested in the formational aspect, in music as a process.

At this stage you must admit that whatever is seen to be sentient is nevertheless composed of atoms that are insentient. The phenomena open to our observation so not contradict this conclusion or conflict with it. Rather they lead us by the hand and compel us to believe that the animate is born, as I maintain, of the insentient.

I like your opera - I think I will set it to music

The guitar is a miniature orchestra in itself.

Durante veintiún días, escribió casi sin parar. Luego pasó otros dos días trabajando en la orquestación. En veinticuatro días, completó el manuscrito de doscientos sesenta páginas. Llamó a esa obra El Mesías.

Lots of people imagine wrongly that 'My Favorite Things' is one of my compositions; I would have loved to have written it, but it's by Rodgers and Hammerstein.

A family is a unit composed not only of children but of men, women, an occasional animal, and the common cold

White space is to be regarded as an active element, not a passive background.