Quotes About Composition

I write novellas because I don't like loose sprawling prose.

The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality.

What happens with a good score is, somehow the composer manages to cast himself or herself in the role of the protagonist. And then you write from their perspective.

I never can understand how two men can write a book together. To me, that's like three people getting together to have a baby.

it was neither the quality nor the quantity that was at fault. It was the mixture.

Mejores y más felices los que, reconociendo la ficción de todo, componen su novela antes de que les sea compuesta y, como Maquiavelo, visten los trajes de la corte para escribir bien en secreto.

The composition of my desserts is taken care of by the farmers' market.

Big forms fascinate me.

I don't like fast editing.

My favourite chord? Bb6th with added 9th.

Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction.

When you're working on film music, you're only working on 20, 30-minute sections at a time.

With film music, endings are often more difficult than beginnings, because a beginning is an underline, a way of exciting a moment, and then you have to find a way to dissipate that.

I never watch the dailies. What I usually do is have a look at the rough or final cut, and I just get something from the story. Sometimes I start composing even before the director has shot anything. The dailies don't help me at all.

Well, let me, first of all, say, that as a microtonal composer, I've never been much of a theorist.

One of the first things I want do when I start writing music for a film is to create its own sound world, its own music world.

I write the songs, go in and record them, then I listen to everything and decide how it all fits together.

Most of the time I approach a track as series of experiments: seeing what fits, and trying to manipulate sounds into each other so they have some kind of dialogue, and then start building a structure around it.

The first thing I do is take Polaroids of the sitter - 10 or 12 color Polaroids and eight or 10 black-and whites.

Clare Fischer was a major influence on my harmonic concept. He and Bill Evans, and Ravel and Gil Evans, finally. You know, that's where it really came from. Almost all of the harmony that I play can be traced to one of those four people and whoever their influences were.

The thing I realised about composition is, we remember most composers for four bars of music. Four singable bars of music. Pretty much any major composer from Debussy to Ravel to Mozart to whoever else - you can kind of hum it.

When I attained my seventh year, my father, whose ear was unmusical but who was nevertheless passionately fond of music, gave me my elementary lessons on the violin; in a very few months, I was able to play all manner of compositions at sight.

My central quest was to have a piece played on the saxophone sound like more than one instrument, exploiting different registers and wide interval leaps.

If I have to point to something specific with the way I move my camera, I love to do it with a wide lens. I like to show you as much of the space as I can, even if I'm following a character.