Quotes About Composition

There are only twelve tones and they need to be treated carefully.

The recipe for a human doesn't fill up a shopping list as you may suspect. Just twenty-two elements can describe almost all of the molecules that are, at this moment, you.

I am not a composer of music; I sing pieces which have been written for me which gives me bigger freedom to search for pieces I want to record.

About 70 percent of everything is really sketched out on my keyboard beforehand, because I do want accidents to happen in the studio.

When I was working on the music for this I didn't want to just use pop songs as the score - most movies do it and I've done it before.

When it's a pop song, I don't really want to do pop songs, but they exist and sort of come out by accident.

The recipe for any character is always very interesting, as far as what doses of certain qualities you want.

If you're reading a comic strip, you can read it at any speed you want. But with film and music, the audience has to take it the way the composer gives it.

It is important to understand what are you trying to capture with a camera. What you want to use this tool for. It helps to begin to search for and concentrate on thematic photography.

I'm always writing songs, and I've got a bunch that I want to record.

We're falling into a place where melody is somewhat lacking in music. Everybody feels like, okay, too much melody or too much harmony, and it kind of goes over people's heads; they don't understand it.

As for my own music, I've never written a book about it. I'm not pedagogical... When I write an abstract piano sonata or a concerto, I write what I feel. I'm not a self-conscious composer.

Every song is like a painting.

What makes film music different is that we are always given a situation and we make the song accordingly.

If you can't play it on an acoustic guitar or a grand piano then it's not a song.

Usually when a song comes to me, I don't ask a lot of questions; I hear something, and I just let it out in song. It's like making a salad. Everything I hear, and everything I am, I mix together in a different way in each song.

The thing is, in English I'm able to write the lyrics as I'm making the song, once I'm done with the melody.

I usually write to the beat. Really, the beat can make the song itself.

A rhyme doesn't make a song.

While the concert is instant communication with the audience, composing is a creative process where a song comes up out of nowhere and then transmits happiness to many, translates into money, fame, or whatever.

I've always said there aren't great composers- there are great songs.

When you write songs, you're writing little bits here, little bits there.

I work in a dramatic context, meaning we write with a lot of character specifics, a lot of story specifics. There's a lot of architecture in our songs.

When I learning to write songs, I never really was interested in the chorus.