Quotes About Composition

The most stupendous miracle in all music.

There are notes between notes, you know.

I was fifteen years old, and I hardly knew how to play a simple Bach prelude on the piano when I began to compose music, and at the most advanced level. I had never studied such things as harmony.

I compose my own stuff. I've been writing songs with words. I've been playing more on the keyboard because I can transpose it to sheet music on the computer.

The architect must not only understand drawing, but music.

To me, the piano in itself is an orchestra.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Music is the framework around the silence.

Musical compositions, it should be remembered, do not inhabit certain countries, certain museums, like paintings and statues. The Mozart Quintet is not shut up in Salzburg: I have it in my pocket.

Composers today get a TV script on Friday and have to record on Tuesday. It's just dreadful to impose on gifted talent and expect decent music under these conditions.

I really pay attention to the bass in the music I listen to, and that's what I tend to write toward.

Jazz music is a style, not compositions; any kind of music may be played in Jazz if one has the knowledge.

How wonderful opera would be if there were no singers.

Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.

If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.

What came to me as a revelation was the use of rhythm in developing an overall structure in music.

I usually write my music on a piano, and I really enjoy performing that way, because that actually shows how the music was in my mind before it actually became an electronic song.

The emotion is the music and the script is the libretto.

Wagner has lovely moments but awful quarters of an hour.

My mother had to explain that one couldnt compose a Liszt rhapsody because it was a piece of music that Liszt himself had composed.

I believe in using the entire piano as a single instrument capable of expressing every possible musical idea.

I do not ask for my music to be interpreted, but only for it to be played.

Music is liquid architecture; Architecture is frozen music.

The only form of music is melody, without melody music is not feasible, and music and melody are quite inseparable.