Quotes About Composition

People have made a living deconstructing Lennon and The Beatles songs because of their compositional sophistication. But what's so exciting about John is that he never had any of that training on musical theory; something just spoke to him, and he just knew what sounded right.

My hobby is my profession, and therefore, I keep on composing creatively.

So I concentrated on the rhythmic side of things, and therefore left a lot of holes. I didn't want to use big pad chords everywhere. All of the songs are built up of small melodies and counter melodies all played very rhythmically.

Everything that has a spare piano is 'like Satie' and everything with strings is 'filmic,' Sometimes I get annoyed when they say my stuff sounds 'like Satie'. No, it doesn't. At least, I don't think so.

There are three fundamental poses of the human figure. One is standing. The other is seated, and the third is lying down... Of the three poses, the reclining figure gives the most freedom, compositionally and spatially.

So I write melodies - thirty, forty, fifty - then I cast them off until I have just two or three. If only one is needed, I go see the director and ask him to decide.

Music composition was a creative call for me, and it gives me a kick. But I never thought that I would ever sing professionally, even though I used to sing a lot.

Tum Tak' is a beautiful thought and is a rhythmic expression. It's been composed beautifully. It may sound easy but is difficult to attempt or sing it live.

I'm very fond of this phrase: 'Collage is not a refuge for the compositionally disabled.' If you put together the pieces in a really powerful way, I think you'll let a thousand discrepancies bloom.

From building a fire one can learn something about artistic composition. If you use only small kindling and large logs, the fire will quickly eat up the small pieces but will not become strong enough to attack the large ones. You must supply a scale of sizes from the smallest to the largest. The human eye also will not make its way into a painting or building unless a continuum of shapes leads from the small to the large, from the large to the small.

Collect yourself: to smother what you feel, recall to order, summon in one place; making, like Orpheus, a system against loss.

This is a painting that is at best one-third "I love religion so I'm gonna paint my favorite religious figures enjoying a meal" and at least two-thirds "Bro, my vanishing point is off the hook, seriously, check out my wall rectangles, you don't even know.

If you're talking to an architect, he can look at a blank piece of paper, and once the initial design is there, the formula kicks in. Each room should have something unique and different about it - much the same way that in a song, every eight bars or so, a new piece of information should be introduced.

This thing, what is it in itself, in its own constitution? What is its substance and material?

The world is maintained by change—in the elements and in the things they compose. That

Death is such as generation is, a mystery of nature; a composition out of the same elements, and a decomposition into the same;

One addition to the precepts already mentioned. Always make a definition or sketch of what presents itself to your mind, so you can see it stripped bare to its essential nature and identify it clearly, in whole and in all its parts, and can tell yourself its proper name and the names of those elements of which it is compounded and into which it will be dissolved.

A writer's age at the time of a work's composition is never irrelevant.

I sit in the chair and think about the word chair. It can also mean the leader of a meeting. It can also mean a mode of execution. It is the first syllable in charity. It is the French word for flesh. None of these facts has any connection with the others. These are the kinds of litanies I use, to compose myself.

Visual ideas combined with technology combined with personal interpretation equals photography. Each must hold it's own; if it doesn't, the thing collapses.

With the help of modern technology, I can compose intricate keyboard parts and then I have to go back and learn them in order to perform them properly.

Design is as much an act of spacing as an act of marking.

I was very much fascinated with the technology we had that we could edit in the computer our compositions, but all the sounds that were available on the market were crap.

The problem of architecture as I see it is the problem of all art – the elimination of the human element from the consideration of the form.