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Quotes About Composition

If you look at the buildings, you'll find that one part looks as if it was designed by one man, and you go around and look at another facade and it looks as if it was designed by another man, you see.
~ Minoru Yamasaki
I find composition difficult. I never thought of myself as someone who can crank it out. I can't crank it out - I have to dig it out the hard way. In some sense, you become more confident in your technical apparatus, but it becomes harder to do something you haven't done already.
~ Steven Stucky
Once you've developed some technical facility on the guitar, the musical side (which entails theory, harmony, chord structure, ear training, sight-reading, composition and being able to hear chord progressions and licks) comes into play a lot more.
~ John Petrucci
However spontaneous I hope a photograph will look, I always put a lot of thought into how I can make it happen. The very best pictures are the most relaxed, so a lot of fussing around technically can completely break the spell, and everyone freezes up with nerves.
~ Mario Testino
If it's fast, no I don't have enough piano technique. In that case, it's probably been done on some kind of synthesizer or sequencer. Then the score can then be printed out and so forth.
~ Bill Bruford
One thing I always really enjoyed about Quincy Jones' production technique was that there were so many layers to every song. Like, one week you'd hear a new trumpet-line, then the next week you'd hear - be hearing a new guitar-line.
~ Labrinth
Ideally, the music composed these days should sound much better because of the technology, right? But that's not the fact. The sounds that you hear out of technological recording are programmed sounds coming out of a computer.
~ Ilaiyaraaja
The lives of most authors - even, or perhaps especially, the great ones - are necessarily a catalogue of tedious inwardness and cloistered composition. Globe-trotting Hemingways and brawling Christopher Marlowes are the exception, not the rule.
~ Paul Di Filippo
I studied arranging and orchestration a number of years ago, so I have a home studio and arrange about three-fourths of my songs on the computer. Since writing orchestration is tedious, I often put an arrangement on the keyboard and let someone better-qualified finish it.
~ Brian Stokes Mitchell
Your bones are not just made of the last meal you had, but the meals that you've had across many years. By looking at the composition of those teeth, researchers can say that something was a large component of the diet. This tells us a lot about how hominins lived and what they ate.
~ Hope Jahren
Whether it's animated, whether it's live-action, whether it's Broadway, whether it's television, a musical is a musical is a musical. So, pretty much, you approach the songs in pretty much the same way.
~ Alan Menken
The opera tells the story with all the built-in contradictions and from many different angles.
~ Harrison Birtwistle
A shot is only as every as good as how well it tells the story.
~ Simon Baker
Every one of the songs was based around picking an acoustic guitar. That was part of the concept from the beginning, that the tempos were going to go from slow to almost mid-tempo.
~ Jules Shear
Since I started composing I have always worked with series of tempos, even superimposed the music of different groups of musicians, of singers, instrumentalists who play and sing in different tempos simultaneously and then meet every now and then in the same tempo.
~ Karlheinz Stockhausen
I prefer playing in songs where I have a tempo, groove and harmonic map to hang on to.
~ Paul Gilbert
Had she learned how to compose her face into its most photogenic arrangement, to project emotion so beautifully? Or had she simply been a pellucid surface through which her feelings naturally shone?
~ Robert Galbraith
When we hear a Mozart piano concerto today, we're most likely to hear the piano part played on a modern concert grand. In the hands of a professional pianist, such a piano can bury the strings and the winds and hold its own against the brass. But Mozart wasn't composing for a nine-foot-long, thousand-pound piano; he was composing for a five-and-a-half-foot-long, hundred-and-fifty-pound piano built from balsa wood and dental floss.
~ Robert Greenberg
Of all the species of literary composition, perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed, which is wanting in general history.
~ Robert Hall
you'll also notice that inside what is apparently a single line, there is a play of one, two, or three elements, balanced or unbalanced in various ways that are expressive in relation to what the poem is saying.
~ Robert Hass
Good composition is like a suspension bridge - each line adds strength and takes none away.
~ Robert Henri
Good composition is like a suspension bridge; each line adds strength and takes none away... Making lines run into each other is not composition. There must be motive for the connection. Get the art of controlling the observer – that is composition.
~ Robert Henri
Good composition is like a suspension bridge, each line adds strength and takes none away. Thus a work of art is finished from the beginning, as Whistler has said. If there are only ten lines, then they are the ten lines which comprehend the most. Composition is the freedom of a thing to be its greatest best by being in its right place in the organization. It is a just sense of the relation of things.
~ Robert Henri
As you create your story, you create your proof; idea and structure intertwine in a rhetorical relationship
~ Robert McKee