Quotes About Composition

Sometimes I write them down in musical notation as a trigger to remind me about certain directions to go. Or I can be specific about a sound I'm looking for.

I think a lot of composers get into trouble just making up a plot and expecting an audience to follow that.

I have trouble writing if I can't picture how things are going to look.

True nostalgia is an ephemeral composition of disjointed memories.

I played trumpet in the school bands. I learned things I liked to play on my trumpet, but I didn't learn why this note goes with this note and why it produces that sound. Or how to create tension in the composition.

Nothing's ever easy about composing for other people's projects, but I like it. I've been lucky to have worked with adventurous directors who trust me.

A good band is like a team. You want to have the right balance. It's not always the best people you need, but the right ones for the job.

I always have a good reason for taking something out but I never have one for putting something in. And I don't want to, because that means that the picture is being painted predigested.

You're talking about meaning. I want to talk about the picture.

What you photograph is responsible for how a photograph looks - the form, the design, whatever word you want to use.

I don't like to write music by myself anymore. It's boring. I want the jamming, the push and pull, and the excitement that comes with it.

You get used to the exact amount of space between lines. You write a word and then you write an alternate word over it. You want enough room so you can read it, so the lines can't be too close.

In a film score, the last thing you want to do is take people out of the movie. The music is secondary. In opera, the music is the main event.

To me, it's all about the song. Songs are what make me excited. You hear a great song and you want to record it or get a great idea and you want to write it.

Usually one or two things happen: Either you have an idea straightaway - the sort of sound that you want or the instrumentation or one particular sound that you want to feature - or you don't.

Usually, when Nirvana made music, there wasn't a lot of conversation. We wanted everything to be surreal. We didn't want to have some contrived composition.

I'm interested in the structure of art and how it works. And the content is also interesting, but I don't want to keep the same structure and just plug in new content every week.

Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor

Emergent properties can seem magical because they do not seem to arise from the component parts of a structure. [...] Thought [...] seems to be an emergent property of the organization of neurons in brains. [...] "Emergent properties" arise from a particular arrangement of components—they do not appear within the component parts themselves.

Indeed, we humans bear witness to the process of evolution in the very composition of our bodies. The calcium that gives solidity to our bones, the iron that lets our blood carry oxygen to our brains, the sodium and potassium that make possible the transmission of impulses along our nerves, all of these elements were formed inside a star that had its own birth and life and death, hurling its remains outward in a supernova explosion billions of years ago.

And she was not beautiful asleep. Her expression slack and not angelic. The very ordinariness of it so beautiful he felt a yearning to be something more than he was or could be. And as good a player as he was, he knew as he turned on the reel to reel and hugged the Fender once again that nothing he composed would ever be as beautiful as her ordinary sleep. Watching her he played the music of her sleeping. And by surrendering made something beautiful.

Alkan even wrote a piece for four feet, called Bombardo-Carillon, in which the player's legs are likely to get entangled during performance. (When Swiss-American pianist Rudolph Ganz was asked to perform Bombardo-Carillon with a female pianist, he declined on the grounds that he didn't know her well enough.)

The word 'figure' from choreography . . . means something like a momentary attitude of the body or a fragment of a dance.

There are not more than five musical notes, yet the combinations of these five give rise to more melodies than can ever be heard. There are not more than five primary colours, yet in combination they produce more hues than can ever been seen. There are not more than five cardinal tastes, yet combinations of them yield more flavours than can ever be tasted.