Quotes About Composition

To me, finding sounds, or even recording, is a compositional process. The studio is kind of an instrument.

We want to be able to make our own songs and write our own arrangements. We want to incorporate the live sound so we can be free onstage and in the studio recording. That way we can come up with original and creative stuff.

As I started to study old blues recordings and really pay attention to my favorites, it really started to come to me that all of my favorite pieces of music weren't produced, they were performed. The producer is nearly invisible: no thumbprint other than the composition and the performers.

If you can imagine digging into something and trying to fit all the pieces together, that's recruiting for us.

In any case, Ives encouraged me to go into music even though he himself had such a hard time being a composer.

Harmonies are nice.

Some composers end up writing for the guitar as they would write piano music or, more often, harp music. It isn't the same.

I was always good at hearing complete arrangements in my head.

For me, sampling is a high art. Most people don't see it that way, but it's a beautiful thing. I wouldn't know anything about music if it wasn't for samples.

If you have a piece by Bach, he often develops the piece to such a high level that you can hardly do much more to it. But Saint-Luc wrote very simple baroque music, and so if you do not embellish it, it just falls apart. It's way too simple.

Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.

I believe the matter of music to be central to that of the meanings of man, of man's access to or abstention from metaphysical experience. Our capacities to compose and to respond to musical form and sense directly implicate the mystery of the human condition. To ask 'what is music?' may well be one way of asking 'what is man?

We try to make air-tight, intricate songs with melodies and counter-melodies and rhythms that work together, and we try to make it as palatable as possible - something that's not difficult to listen to.

Music teaches us how to work together, how to harmonize.

I really like a lot of different music, and it's taken a while to make them all work together as a unit.

I love countermelodies, I love hooks and melodies that stick in your head. If I could put 20 melodies in a song and they would all work together, I would.

Comedy is math, music is math, and editing is, so I think those all work together.

If it hadn't worked out professionally, I would be teaching music theory and composition in a small college somewhere and playing drums in a jazz trio at the Holiday Inn on weekends, and I'd be happy there, too.

The great thing about working in comics is that visually, you're the sole voice. You have to figure out the staging, the lighting, the composition, the character emotions, the action. You get a script, but you're trying to work it out in individual panels. It's a terrific exercise in creative thinking and creative problem-solving.

I have been working and composing music since 1986. Over the years, I have seen our music industry go through all kinds of transformation.

Complexity that works is built up out of modules that work perfectly, layered one over the other.

I follow a simple formula when I compose. I ask myself, 'What would the audience want to hear?' and 'Why would they buy my CDs?' And the process of answering these questions through music follows. Sometimes, it works. Sometimes, it backfires.

I love writing songs. One of the toughest things is structure; it just works when you use verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge. And as soon as you become aware of that formula, you start to have a bad conscience when you write with that particular structure.

I tell my workshop students, 'I want you to think of yourselves as artists. Then, when you're writing, you're painting, you're crafting, you're making a design, you're sculpting, you're creating choreography, sound, a sound script.'