Quotes About Composition

The first thing I do is lay out that melody and figure out how it has to hold here and then finish to land here, because you know in advance you're going to want the melody to catch four things in the action.

The field of the novel is very rich. If you're a composer, you're well aware of the history of composition, and you are trying to make your music part of that history. You're not ahistorical. In the same way, I think, if you write now, you are writing in the historical context of what the novel has been and what possibilities it has revealed.

I'm a formalist. I'm interested in the history of painting.

It can be very hard to know the history of a particular star, but once in a while, we get lucky and find stars with chemical compositions that likely came from in-falling planets.

Great melody over great riffs is, to me, the secret of it all.

For me, you say the words 'concept record,' and the first thing I think of is theater or the opera or something.

I'm obviously very keen on the theater and I think it's inevitable that some of the orchestral and chamber pieces have got dramatic elements which might even suggest an unspecified dramatic plot of some kind or other, even though it's not in my mind at the time.

My operas and my theatre works are very formal pieces.

I usually start from the most general to the more specific. I'll get an emotional overview for the film as a whole, trying to pinpoint what the musical identity is and come up with thematic ideas - any ideas that identify as succinctly as possible what the film is.

When a theme is beautiful, it's a pleasure to rearrange it or to interweave it with your own music.

When I was a student looking at Leonardo DaVinci and all those guys - Italian, Dutch, or whatever - it's incredible how each piece of the painting fits to the main theme that they want to express.

I always think it's important to choose your initial theme very carefully because you're going to be married to it for a long time. You might have to generate an hour's worth of music from a very short, little piece of theme.

It's all about theme and development anyway. That's what music is about.

Jerry Goldsmith's 'Voyager' theme is a brilliant reworking of the original material.

Writing music is very, very clinical. You just sit down at a piano, map out a theme and when all the technicalities come together, out pours the music.

Yes, basically, like you said, I'll work out a chord pattern and work out the lyrics over that.

The Senate is now composed of a different material from what it once was. Its glory hath departed. Its halls no longer echo the words of a Clay, or Webster, or Calhoun . . . the void is felt.

Architecture is the alpha principle of all arts.

If our consciousnesses can conceive it or our hearts grieve it, someone has composed a reference tidily summing the perfunctory steps to enlightenment. It would seem that we have merely traded one saviour for another, another someone to tell us how. We

In painting, three things must be considered - the position of the viewer, the position of the object viewed, and the position of the light that illuminates the object.

Joseph Robertson wrote in an essay on punctuation in 1785, "The art of punctuation is of infinite consequence in writing; as it contributes to the perspicuity, and consequently to the beauty, of every composition.

novela à reimpressão que ora se faz parece que explicam as diferenças de composição e de maneira do autor. Se este não lhe daria agora a mesma feição, é

You mean you're comparing our lives to a sonnet? A strict form, but freedom within it?" "Yes." Mrs. Whatsit said. "You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.

There would seem to be four stages in the composition of a story. First comes the germ of the story, then a period of more or less conscious meditation, then the first draft, and finally the revision, which may be simply 'pencil work' as John O'Hara calls it — that is, minor changes in wording — or may lead to writing several drafts and what amounts to a new work.