Quotes About Composition

It's always difficult to know if a song needs more than piano, and I worry about my tendency to go in a sparse direction.

We all write the music, and then Mark and Tom write the lyrics.

The still image continues to have a ton of strength. An image taken out of context from one fraction of a second to the next can tell a story, and if photographers are looking to tell a certain story, they can curate those slices of time to their advantage.

The way that I write is I just write a ton of music in the background of my life, and then I just bring it into rehearsal. It's, like, 'Okay, guys. It goes like this. Let's smooth it out.'

As a director, the biggest job is to discern the imperfections in emotional tone and then view it in the global picture of what you're trying to do, if that makes sense. It's a rhythm, like music is a rhythm or composition and art is a rhythm. Dialogue is a rhythm as well.

I love getting time to write a piece of music that can settle in and set the tone of the show.

I think I've improved in the finesse and the tone and compositional skills. But I think I basically still kind of play the way I did back then, too. You sort of get to a point and that's how you play.

Music is about depth. Music is about harmony. Music is about notes and tones.

Sometimes a piece of music in the score isn't effective. When a score is too well finished with too many elements, sometimes it's too much.

If you make it sound too much like a synth, it will just sound like a guitar part played on a synth.

There are no leftover Tool songs because of the process it takes to compose our songs - the way we hash it out in a room with all three or four of us, that there's tons of riffs and jams and things. But there's no put-together songs that are sitting in the eaves.

Most of the parts are really gone over and over and over again with Tool. It's a very composed situation. We spend weeks if not months working on all those songs. There's not much room for improvisation.

A lot of people in my generation, we use hip-hop as a tool to compose.

I often use triadic arpeggio forms within my riffs and solos as a tool to create rich-sounding, poly-chordal sounds.

I don't want to wear my compositional tools on my sleeve.

I play keyboards and Pro Tools, if you want to look at it as an instrument.

When I design buildings, I think of the overall composition, much as the parts of a body would fit together. On top of that, I think about how people will approach the building and experience that space.

I have always felt that I am the sum total of my parts.

The totality of a record is usually beyond ones ability to imagine when you start working on it, but the component parts are, usually, fairly clear one way or another.

A fruit salad is delicious precisely because each fruit maintains its own flavor.

The new kind of music seems to create not from the heart but from the head. Its composers think rather than feel. They have not the capacity to make their works exalt - they meditate, protest, analyze, reason, calculate and brood, but they do not exalt.

Sometimes, you start with the drawing and then the gag comes to you in the middle of it. That is when you start working on the solution of the gag, which is composition, placing, equilibrium, and character design.

The pail containing the fish was part of the vertical axis of the painting and rested on a round table held up by a single foot.

Sonatina in C Major, op. 36, no. 1.