Quotes About Composition

When drawings of the main buildings I have designed in the last five years are juxtaposed, the fact that they all involve the pursuit of certain configurations is obvious to anyone.

You're creating a score that has to have an emotional and story logic to it. You want a dramatic arc. You want all the songs to push story forward. That's the same whether it's for stage or film or television or whatever.

To create architecture is to put in order. Put what in order? Function and objects.

It's a big plethora of music floating around in my head all the time, and I'll sit there and write a song.

When you're putting together a concept album, it's all about the flow and the story.

It should consist of short, sharply focused sentences, each of which is a whole scene in itself.

Or the other process that is important is that I compress longer sections of composed music, either found or made by myself, to such an extent that the rhythm becomes a timbre, and formal subdivisions become rhythm.

All literature is an effort at the formal character of the epigram.

I fortunately have a good memor, and that helps a lot in the way I write.

I played the piccolo in the 'Ides of March' and 'The Fantastic Mr. Fox' score.

To make the script, you need ideas, and for me a lot of times, a final script is made up of many fragments of ideas that came at different times.

I like the camera to be still and not very shaky and have everything happen within the frame.

I aim my arrangements at what will fit and colorfully frame the song in the best way possible.

When I go on set, it's very important, the lenses I choose, what I choose to frame or not frame and that's how I make my movies.

The drone is a very fundamental part of my music, although it's not always present.

Erra chi dice che le lettere guastano e' cervelli degli uomini, perché è forse vero in chi l'ha debole; ma dove lo truovano buono, lo fanno perfetto; perché el buono naturale congiunto col buono accidentale fa nobilissima composizione.

For any writer, the ability to look at a sentence and see what's superfluous, what can be altered, revised, expanded, and, especially, cut, is essential.

The creation and destruction of harmonic and 'statistical' tensions is essential to the maintenance of compositional drama. Any composition (or improvisation) which remains consonant and 'regular' throughout is, for me, equivalent to watching a movie with only 'good guys' in it, or eating cottage cheese.

Without Louie Louie a symphony is not quite so grand.

I don't write things that are wildly abstractly atonal.

I want to write orchestral music. I want to get a group of singers together and sing William Byrd songs.

I think John Williams, him and his team, have been incredible orchestrators. By that, I mean how he chooses which instrument plays which note.

Something I grew up with is John Williams, of course, with 'Indiana Jones' and 'Star Wars.'

I have always been willing to admit when I made a mistake. I made a mistake in my understanding of the composition of the Contras, not on my opposition to the Contra war.