Quotes About Composition

All my records have been written to be records, rather than writing a group of songs and seeing if they fit together.

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

The fault, in their view, lay with no single person, but with the middle class composition of the colony, which, feeling itself imperiled, had acted instinctively, as an organism, to extrude the riffraff from its midst.

there are naturally large individual differences in the chemical makeup of people's saliva.

Finally, in his thick German accent, Max politely explained that all musical phrases must consist of an even number of bars.

Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph.

Put black on white.

Good ideas are not conjured out of thin air; they are built out of a collection of existing parts, the composition of which expands (and, occasionally, contracts) over time. Some of those parts are conceptual: ways of solving problems, or new definitions of what constitutes a problem in the first place. Some of them are, literally, mechanical parts.

as we become familiar with something, we think about it more in terms of the use we put it to and less in terms of what it looks like and what it is made of.

creative wordsmiths, who need to know the canons of pedestrian prose

They left. Among the many dumb rules of paragraphing foisted on students in composition courses is the one that says that a paragraph may not consist of a single sentence. Wilkerson ends a richly descriptive introductory chapter with a paragraph composed of exactly two syllables. The abrupt ending and the expanse of blankness at the bottom of the page mirror the finality of the decision to move and the uncertainty of the life that lay ahead. Good writing finishes strong.

the difficulty of a sentence depends not just on its word count but on its geometry. Good writers often use very long sentences, and they garnish them with words that are, strictly speaking, needless. But they get away with it by arranging the words so that a reader can absorb them a phrase at a time, each phrase conveying a chunk of conceptual structure.

I try to find nice chord changes, that's how I love to start, and then I start trying to knock it into a song, knock it into shape.

Composers love to write for symphony orchestras because the symphony is the Rolls Royce of musical instruments.

I have one piece of music, since 1997, and I don't see it having lyrics. Where does it go in this world? So I haven't recorded it.

You can't write a sonnet if you have to look up the spelling of each word as you go.

The grid system is an aid, not a guarantee. It permits a number of possible uses and each designer can look for a solution appropriate to his personal style. But one must learn how to use the grid; it is an art that requires practice.

The chief ingredients in the composition of those qualities that gain esteem and praise, are good nature, truth, good sense, and good breeding.

collage = reality

Not even the stretto fugues of The Art of Fugue are as single-minded as the Fugue in C Major, whose twenty-seven bars include no episodes and, apart from subject entries, no more than a total of two bars of transitional music preparing the fugue's three cadences . . . plus a miniature peroration in which the whole thing gently goes up in smoke, up to a high C we have never heard before.

Everything is in the way the material is composed.

Two elements, the one objective, the other subjective, enter into the composition of every Sac rament : the external rite and the interior intention.

Una persona de setenta kilos de peso contiene, entre otras cosas: — 45 litros de agua — Suficiente cal para encalar un gallinero — Suficiente fósforo para 2.200 cerillas — Grasa para alrededor de 70 pastillas de jabón — Hierro para un clavo de 2 pulgadas — Carbono para 9.000 minas de lápiz — Una cucharada de magnesio

Con los rostros nos pasa como con los cuadros: aunque a menudo nos gusten a primera vista, sólo mucho más tarde reconocemos las leyes de su composición.