Quotes About Composition

My starting point is always to read a script and have a conversation with the director about what their vision is, and then, after that, I love to do research.

I wrote 'Black Deutschland' very quickly one summer, probably because I had a lot of it in pieces and fragments sitting around over the years as false starts or notes.

Every song I write, including 'Too Close,' always starts on the guitar.

Everything starts and ends with the song, and working with writers and really learning their process and craft was an invaluable experience.

First and foremost, it's got to be on the page. It starts with the writing.

All my music is very simple in that melody is usually clearly stated.

It's not about composition. It's the way you feel about how your objects should relate to each other. I've got lots of African statues and things, and the cleaner arranges them like soldiers, which drives me mad. So I have to rearrange them, and I must drive her mad, because I'm doing anarchy and she's doing military manoeuvres.

What has stayed true all the way through my work is my composition, I hope, and my sense of color.

For musical compositions to reach a high level and to derive from spontaneity, of course, one has to do the necessary steps to learn the rules and regulations of composing high quality music.

All the children in the school should learn the steps of everything, before they learn the thing, then they know which step they're doing better, because your voice is in certain steps and has to do most of the things that have been composed in those steps.

Melody, for Baroque composers, is prose, not poetry. It does not come in paired lines (like a folk song, or a Schubert Lied), but in rhetorical sentences or paragraphs.

There is something exceedingly ridiculous in the composition of monarchy; it first excludes a man from the means of information, yet empowers him to act in cases where the highest judgment is required. The state of a king shuts him from the world, yet the business of a king requires him to know it thoroughly; wherefore the different parts, by unnaturally opposing and destroying each other, prove the whole character to be absurd and useless.

As far as melodies go, I could probably write 100 songs in a day - with no words of course - just because I love melody.

I do spend time trying to find good melodies, and I try to remember them when I do discover them. But also it's mostly intuitive; I noodle around with the line until it sounds and feels right.

I normally start at the computer with something really simple like a four-bar loop of a drum sample or a bass line. And then I just start adding layers of synthesizers.

Normally, when people compose for film, you give them the film, and they look at it, and they compose it.

Normally the amount of music we have is what you hear on the album and that's it.

There is a world of difference between a Mahler eighth note and a normal eighth note.

Every single note on this album is there for a reason.

I spend time editing and massaging each note. Then I start layering with different instruments, adding harmonies, counterpoint, and whatever the song calls for. Then I arrange it into a whole piece, and decide where I need to add live musicians. It takes a lot of time, but it is very satisfying once it is complete.

For me, the only thing that makes one scale different from another is not the starting note; it's the separation of the intervals.

If I have a song where I hit some really high notes, I want to try to bring in equivalently low notes somewhere in there.

There are only so many notes so there must be only so many melodies.

Most of those melodies are me trying to find out what notes fit, and then hitting ones that don't fit in a very interesting way.