Quotes About Composition

Nobody ever wrote a good book simply by collecting a number of accurate facts and valid ideas.

By acquiring all of your furniture from different eras and places and things that are expensive and inexpensive, it will make your end product have a great spirit.

You can have a great lyric and a so-so melody; it's going to be a tough sell.

The talent of historians lies in their creating a true ensemble out of facts which are but half true.

It is not a sin to introduce a personal bias that can be recognized and discounted. The sin in historical composition is the organization of the story in such a way that bias cannot be recognized.

A lot of the great songwriters in history have been collaborators, with a separate lyricist.

You have all the scenes. Just go home and word it in.

The only instrument I can play is piano. Whenever I make songs at home, I play the piano and make them on the piano.

I feel at home in an orchestral score.

I recently did a piece for the Boston Pops and John Williams, and I hope that it's as well a composed piece as I've ever done for any other medium or occasion.

Like people, a picture has a skeleton, muscles and skin.

That isn't writing at all, it's typing.

A true sonnet goes eight lines and then takes a turn for better or worse and goes six or eight lines more.

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

They say everything looks better with odd numbers of things. But sometimes I put even numbers—just to upset the critics.

There are a lot of cameramen but not so many photographers. And a lot of cameramen attack from a technical approach without much imagination. They look, but they don't see.

Those Dutchmen had hardly any imagination or fantasy, but their good taste and their scientific knowledge of composition were enormous.

Anything played wrong twice in a row is the beginning of an arrangement.

The last thing we decide in writing a book is what to put first.

The fact is, nothing great or enduring, especially in music, has ever sprung full-fledged and unprecedented from the brain of any master; the best that he gives to the world he gathers from the hearts of the people, and runs it through the alembic of his genius.

The little Prelude in C Major that starts the set is one of Bach's most famous and beloved pieces (it was reportedly a favorite of his, too), yet what appears to be a simple rippling up and down on chords disguises a complex interweaving of melodies.

ANOTHER PRODUCT OF THE SPRING WAS THE QUINTET IN E-FLAT FOR Piano and Winds, K. 452.

I've been a teacher at the college level, in composition mostly, and I've been an editor on magazines.

As long as you read this poem I will be writing it.