Quotes About Composition

Making an easy song is very tough.

Yes, but I view Frank's music as fully composed. In other words, the arrangements can work for any idiom such as a rock band or an orchestra. Frank was a brilliant arranger and could make his music work in any context. He proved that tour after tour and album after album.

At times on overseas tours, we assess if there are more left-handers or right-handers in the opposition and accordingly, the team's composition is set.

Even when I don't think I'm writing, I'm writing. There's some part of my brain geared toward making songs up, and I know it's collecting things and I know when I get a moment to be by myself, that's when they come out.

My intention here is to make it clear that not a single cell of my composition, here in regard to The Raven, is found by chance or intuition, that the composition moved towards perfection with the precision and inevitability of a mathematical equation.

If you're writing a piece for the Boston Pops, the balance is towards one end. If you're writing a piece for a chamber music society, then it's towards another point. I won't make a final answer on that. I think it changes with every piece.

Eighty percent of my pieces gravitate towards an A, as a tonal thing, not at the beginning, but somewhere in it.

I always just sit down at the piano and make the main hook - what I want the track to be about melodically - and then I'll build everything else around that. But growing up, I did not play any instruments.

As far as arrangements after the basic track is cut, if I'm writing a horn arrangement or playing strings, I might arrange that, plan that out. Other times, I'll just sit and roll tape.

I really love crafting albums and thinking of albums as a whole, not just individual songs or singles or just tracks, but a whole entire album.

Besides the two Christmas things, we've got a about a dozen new tracks we're working on.

Sometimes I just hit the keyboard in a way I'd like the rhythm of the tracks to sound.

I started writing rhymes first and then put it to the music. I figured out I could lock it to the beat better if I heard the music first. I like to get a lot of tracks, put the track up and let the music talk to me about what it's about.

Riffs are a repeating thing. They come back to you. Some of the things on 'Back in Black' were ideas we had knocked around on tracks before that: 'That bit - maybe we should take a chunk of that and slug it in here.'

I'm used to making songs; that's how I learned to make music. My structures will always be more like pop songs than dance tracks.

For every album we worked on, I brought in reels of tape of somewhere between fourteen and eighteen songs - some of them completed, with lyrics and melodies, some of them basic tracks. Things came out of those products. Like, for 'Hotel California', I think I had a reel with sixteen songs on it.

I have an obsession with making an album rather than a collection of tracks. For me it's like making a film - it's the perfect length of time to tell a story.

I record a lot of stuff on my phone when I'm out and about and regularly use the recordings in my tracks.

Optical units close to each other on a picture plane tend to be seen together and, consequently, one can stabilize them in coherent figures.

Fit the parts together, one into the other, and build your figure like a carpenter builds a house. Everything must be constructed, composed of parts that make a whole.

Directing is like putting together a collage.

Chemists have always been in the business of taking atoms and putting them together with other atoms with precisely defined connections.

I want to write a play. I'd like to do an original musical. I should probably put together a poetry collection.

With music, it feels natural that, in my head, I can pull things apart and then put them back together very quickly.