Quotes About Composition

People don't realize you're blowing over changes, time changes, harmony, different keys. I mark a point in my solo where it's got to peak at point D I go to A, B, C D then I'm home.

A period may be defined as a portion of speech that has in itself a beginning and an end, being at the same time not too big to be taken in at a glance

A novel is really like a symphony where instrument after instrument has to come in at its own time, and no other.

I thought it was time to get a group together and the first person I thought of was Wayne Shorter. I called Wayne and in the meantime, Wayne called me to make an album with him, which was Super Nova.

I currently spend a lot of time thinking about orchestration and every detail of a piece.

Music is geometry in time.

Those who are learning to compose and arrange their sentences with accuracy and order are learning, at the same time, to think with accuracy and order.

Sometimes in composition class, when I have been confronted by someone who simply cannot get the first word written on paper, I give the following advice: Say your essay into a tape recorder and then write it down.

The finished paper is still 5 percent water.

Structure is an art. In some ways, it's the only art.

You don't take a photograph, you make it.

I have often said that the negative is similar to a musician's score, and the print to the performance of that score. The negative comes to life only when performed as a print.

I don't write lovely music." He was willing, however, to compose the score for the MGM production of The Good Earth. His demands were appropriate but unacceptable. He wanted fifty thousand dollars, and complete control of the soundtrack; the actors were to speak in the same pitch and key he composed in (as if Paul Muni and Luise Rainer didn't have enough difficulty playing Chinese peasants!).

Bach's Wohltemperierte Klavier

The greater the length, the more beautiful will the piece be by reason of its size, provided that the whole be perspicuous." (VII)

a poet must be a composer of plots rather than of verses

How can a man who, for a significant phase of his formation, shared his master's opposition to rhetoric have in maturity composed a masterpiece of the formal study of rhetoric? This

All the elements of an Epic poem are found in Tragedy, but the elements of a Tragedy are not all found in the Epic poem.

A lot of photographers think that if they buy a better camera they'll be able to take better photographs. A better camera won't do a thing for you if you don't have anything in your head or in your heart.

Discounting every punctuation mark and every space—which any printer knows occupy just as much time to set as does a single letter—there are no fewer than 227,779,589 letters and numbers.

Diction involves the choice of words for their precise meaning and sound, the arrangement of those words, and their selection for effect.

A good song is like a mannequin - its form makes sense, but there's no life. There should be memorable melody, thoughtful lyric, appropriate arrangement.

Mankind is a melody, every being around you is a note you have to mix in the right order in your life

Millions of things came back to her. Atoms danced apart and massed themselves. But how did they compose what people called a life?