Quotes About Composition

'Goliath' is about nine, 10 minutes long, and the end of it is so interesting, we didn't really want it to be used as a single.

Food is like music. You've got two kinds, good and bad.

I like all good music - rock, pop, country, classical - and when you sit down to write, it all comes out.

If you've got a good song, it's easy to play. But you can't make a bad song sound good no matter who you have to play on it.

To make anything successful, you need a good writer.

Beethoven's music is music about music.

I demand from a book harmony as unity and moderation; that determines the choice of words, the type and number of metaphors, the development and conclusion

If that note is made the first note in a new melody, then it will become harmonious.

You keep on balancing and balancing and balancing until the picture wins, because then the subject's turned into the picture.

He that composes himself is wiser than he that composes a book.

I think a good guitar solo sounds so much better within the context of a good song.

A recreation is not the same as a remix. A recreation has a new element added to it. There are new lyrics added to it. A new composition is introduced within the existing one and I feel that's tougher to do.

Woke Up Today' is a number of different sections compounded together. There's the melodica solo section which is three divisions; there's the really funky thing in eleven before that, there's the chorus and verse and there's the ending which slows down and speeds up.

Film scores are often based on short themes, and it helps if you've got some way of developing these themes and making them sometimes last 4 minutes and sometimes last 40 seconds. One ends up doing it subconsciously.

Making a film is like making a mixtape. You're collecting all this stuff and putting your favorite stuff into it: you have actors that you like, characters that you're interested in, moments you want to explore, themes you want to deal with, music that you want to put in. It's a pastiche of all these things that deal with how you see the world.

Musical themes developing is a lot of what classical music is based on, and exposition and recapitulation - these kinds of things I find oppressive.

What I love with 'Game of Thrones' is, every season, I get to continue to develop the existing themes; every season, I also get to write new themes.

My task is to tell a story with the music. I always like to have themes in terms of characters or plots, and things that can tell a story always interest me the most.

One of the struggles that I have with classical music is the way one thinks about a recapitulation. There's always this idea of themes, and I have trouble with that.

Many times, the way I write my themes or melodies is that I hear it, and then I sing into my phone or something, or I'll scribble down on a piece of paper.

If architecture is frozen music then music must be liquid architecture.

I write music that sounds complex but isn't. I frankly never think in terms of theory.

In the first quarter of the nineteenth century the experimental proof for the interdependence of the composition and properties of chemical compounds resulted in the theory that they are mutually related, so that like composition governs like properties, and conversely.

When I dealt with set theory, I could never make it be the music that I wanted.