Quotes About Composition

My mom's a concert pianist, so she started teaching me when I was around seven. When I was eight, I started writing my own songs, and kinda started putting piano and singing together. But I'm trained classically, which is a big influence on me, I think.

The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.

Reusing pieces of code is like picking off sentences from other people's stories and trying to make a magazine article.

The new repertoire, almost to a song, had lost its collaborative aspect. They were individual efforts—

Frye's influence on me lasted twenty years but came to an abrupt halt on my thirty-seventh birthday, July 11, 1967, when I awakened from a nightmare and then passed the entire day in composing a dithyramb, "The Covering Cherub; or, Poetic Influence.

Whether I'm writing solo stuff, electronic stuff, or material for Motley, I just write to write. I come up with it and put things in different piles.

Writing music is just like writing a book.

Melody is king, and don't you ever forget it. Lyrics appear to be out front, but they're not; they're just an accompanying factor. If they're good, you're really in good shape. Lyrics are written to be rewritten.

The improvisational nature of jazz musicianship is such that a truly competent performer must be prepared to function as an on-the-spot composer who is expected to contribute to the orchestration in progress, not simply to execute the score as it is written and rehearsed.

In the U.K., classical music is composed by individuals and written down. Indian music is based on certain sequences called ragas. When I perform live, 95% of the music is improvised: it never sounds the same twice.

The most immediately gratifying thing about my work is conducting a large orchestra. But the long range payoff is composing because you've written something and it's there forever.

'Free Mind' was a song written over a couple of years. It was pretty much three different songs that I couldn't figure out how to put together - until one day, when I was in the studio, it kind of just fell into place.

Sometimes, I sit with my guitar and start playing... something or the other pops into my head... Basically, I write whatever that comes to my mind. I've written a lot of songs, but they are lying in my cupboard... I mean to do something about them someday.

What I'm after is a composed music that will sound like improvised music when improvisors play it. You shouldn't be able to tell what parts are being improvised and what parts were written out beforehand; it should sound like the same music.

I generally prefer to come in to the studio with a fully written song and then work on the arrangement with the band. Sometimes even the arrangements are pretty much already worked out in my head, but other times we experiment.

When I'm scoring something like a string quartet, it's all notated music, so it's meticulously written in the score, which is very different than doing things by ear.

Remember that I wrote a pavane for a dead princess, and not a dead pavane for a princess!

My first serious attempts at writing were made in 1868, and I took up two very different lines of composition; I wrote some short stories of a very flimsy type, and also a work of a much more ambitious character, 'The Lives of the Black Letter Saints.'

A lot of people don't know that Beethoven, when he wrote the Fifth Symphony, that second movement, he took eight years to figure that out!

I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2,000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.

When the Beatles wrote 'Paperback Writer,' it couldn't have been the same old thing. You can hear so many influences in it, from the blues to Bach, and it's not just verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge chorus. They start off singing a cappella, almost like a Bach chorale, and the song goes into this bluesy guitar riff.

I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces.

I probably wrote three-quarters of the songs without an instrument in my hands.

I wrote the tunes and sang only nonsense words. Then came Moore and dressed them with the lyrics.