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Exlpore more Composer quotes

"The composers could no longer direct all performances in person, and so the responsibility of interpreting their works in the spirit in which they had been conceived was placed upon conductors."

"Composers shouldn't think too much - it interferes with their plagiarism."

"Then I started listenin' a lot to classical composers. Piano works. Just to see what they were doin'. That sort of put me in a different groove to try to blend all that in."

"The Russian composers, especially, tricked the symphony orchestra into the kind of dynamic, rhythmic thing."

"The Western musical canon came about not merely by accumulation, but by opposition and subversion, both to the ruling powers on whom composers depended for their livelihoods and to other musics."
Explore more quotes by John Corigliano

"The structural thinking I use in the concert hall is unnecessary to most film projects, and most film composers make better use of the enormous range of pop and other materials and techniques required of them than I probably would, faced with the same challenge."

"Eighty percent of my pieces gravitate towards an A, as a tonal thing, not at the beginning, but somewhere in it."

"What I think of as style - and I've gotten to this over years of really thinking about it - is that style is the unconscious choices I make."

"The French Revolution is the ultimate modernist statement. Destroy everything. Don't build on the past. There is no past."

"I think it's good for the composer to teach because you always have new students and you have to begin at the beginning and make things clear."

"I find respect for a mediocre British composer, as opposed to a really good American, ridiculous because they automatically respect a composer if he's from England."

"You become a great composer when you win a Pulitzer. But I think that now it's a completely meaningless award."

"I don't think that the Pulitzer should be given the way it is. I think the competition should be anonymous. I think completely different people would win it if the names were taken off because a lot of it is done on relationships and names."

"Jazz is not the popular culture. Jazz is in the same position in our culture as classical music. A very small minority of people really love it."
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