Quotes About Composition

Every face has expression of a far more interesting and enduring kind than these momentary disturbances of its form occasioned by laughter or some passing thought, &c. And it must never be forgotten that a portrait is a panel painted to remain for centuries without movement. So that a large amount of the quality of repose must enter into its composition.

Duke Ellington was famous for hs very original harmonic patterns.

Architecture is the learned game; correct and magnificent of forms assembled in the light

the table of elements does not contain one of the most powerful elements that make up our world, and that is the element of surprise.

The human body is about 60% water- more than half of each and every one of us. Being a body of water is something you can say about absolutely anyone. So if you are ever asked what a certain person is like and you cannot think of anything nice to say, you can just reply "they're mostly water.

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how good Mrs. West could have written such books and collected so many hard works, with all her family cares, is still more a matter of astonishment! Composition seems to me impossible with a head full of joints of mutton and doses of rhubarb.

Just like life. Each person was like one line of music, but nobody knew what the symphony sounded like. Only the conductor had the whole score.

My songs have a lot going on in them -they're packed with sounds. When I have only three or four minutes to capture something, I guess I can't stand the idea of any bar going unloved.

I'm suspicious of the idea of categories in music and this idea of things being in boxes. To me, that seems unnatural. I write the music that somebody with my biography would write, and the thing that's always driven me is an enthusiasm for the material. I sort of follow the notes to where they want to go.

With a computer, you have access to so many drum sounds and samples that your snare drum will be unrelated harmonically to your kick drum.

Tones sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes.

Songwriting is an art unto itself, not to be confused with performing.

It's not unusual to have only three weeks to score a picture. And that's three weeks from signing on to finishing the last recording session. That's how I did 'The Queen' and, more recently, it's how I did 'The Imitation Game.'

I used a baritone guitar with a very unusual tuning that became the body of the composition, while the classical guitar is on top of it with the main rhythm part.

Picasso's superhuman gift for draftsmanship might have made him lazy about pursuing the full potential of color. It was not unusual for him to build a composition by first outlining figures and objects in black and then filling the interstices in a perfunctory manner that can put one in mind of a museum-shop coloring book.

Take '39 Steps'. When I finished writing it, I counted the number of measures in the composition. I always do this because I am interested in the length of a song. So I counted this one a couple of times because 39 is an unusual number of measures for a song.

Classical scores go up and down; they're kind of hysterical in a way. And movie scores are much more - they just drive and move forward, and they build and can't go up and down at that same speed. It's a big job to turn that into something that pushes the movie along.

There's rises and falls and ups and downs in all music.

I know Pandit Ravi Shankar was very upset with me, as I did not use his compositions in 'Gandhi.' I thought that the London Philharmonic Orchestra would prove more effective than his music. It was one of my biggest miscalculations.

It is the melody which is the charm of music, and it is that which is most difficult to produce. The invention of a fine melody is a work of genius.

Every good composition is above all a work of abstraction. All good painters know this. But the painter cannot dispense with subjects altogether without his work suffering impoverishment.

Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed, an architectural one, where it is constructed, and finally a textile one, where it is woven.

Writing music is not so much inspiration as hard work.