Quotes About Composition

A photograph can, by the addition of an unimportant spot of color, become a photomontage, a work of art of a special kind.

The score is doing a lot of work. It's like Wagner. It's like a yak carrying people.

A novel is a piece of architecture. It's not random wallowings or confessional diaries. It's a building-it has to have walls and floors and the bathrooms have to work.

Nearly all the synth work on Heathen is mine and some of the piano.

For a true work of creativity, you must reach beyond yourself to bring correct draftsmanship together with strong composition and lifelike colors.

And over the last ten years, after my work with the Brodsky Quartet, I had the opportunity to write arrangements for chamber group, chamber orchestra, jazz orchestra, symphony orchestra even.

All these tales of people sitting down and composing symphonies just as though they were writing a letter are very much exaggerated; at least, it isn't that way in my work.

All that is not useful in a picture is detrimental. A work of art must be harmonious in its entirety; for superfluous details would, in the mind of the beholder, encroach upon the essential elements.

If you try to have a fashion show with Bach fugues and John Coltrane, it doesn't really work.

My harmony is passable but is usually made more eloquent at the hands of Steve Hamilton.

For Stevie, the words are of prime importance; the song moves around the words, rather than the words moving around the song.

I try and write a fair amount in the beginning without the movie. And then when I do get the movie I create these demos, just mock-ups, and I throw them up against the picture and some of it sticks and some of it doesn't. But I'm very careful before I play anything to picture, because that's such a profoundly important moment.

When I think of Morricone, more than his using a specific instrument or a specific sound, it's his way of approaching music that sticks out.

I look at making records like you make a dish. A culinary experience. The way you throw in a tambourine, it's like spices or herbs. The main part of the song is the stock.

We don't want to be Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones. That type of thing wasn't what we were after. It was most important for each of us to be equal in input and output - each of us has to pull the same amount, musically, in composition and in every sense of being in the band.

A sculpture is just a painting cut out and stood up somewhere.

It was very challenging, trying to add an orchestra on top of these traditional African rhythms, because as soon as you add any kind of melody or chords over it, it stops feeling African.

Suprisingly, one of the most complex pieces of code is the code to determine where a note is in the staff. Finale stores notes as relative scale positions in the current key.

I'm always storing away phrases and ideas and things that I think might turn into songs.

Objects in pictures should so be arranged as by their very position to tell their own story.

If you're a film composer, you have the music tell the story of the character.

Every single song I write has to feel like it has a beginning, middle, and end, like a movie or a short story.

I think only of objects: of a leg or an arm, of the wonderful sense of foreshortening, breaking through the plane, of the division of space, of the combination of straight lines in relation to curved ones.

I have a very strange melodic gift: melodies come to me effortlessly.