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"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."
Challenge
"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."
Choice
"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."
Love
"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."
American
"I think art can reflect tragedy."
Art
"I have tremendous respect for film composers."
Composer
"Eighty percent of my pieces gravitate towards an A, as a tonal thing, not at the beginning, but somewhere in it."
Beginning
"You become a great composer when you win a Pulitzer. But I think that now it's a completely meaningless award."
Now
"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."
Beginning
"Art is not only about angst."
Art
More
"I loved Hendrix. I mean, really, really loved him. As if he were one of the great classical composers. And he was. That's how I saw him."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Pianists call me a composer, composers call me a pianist. The classicists think me a futurist, and the futurists call me a reactionary."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Composers shouldn't think too much - it interferes with their plagiarism."
Author Name
Personal Development
"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."
Author Name
Personal Development
"I was not influenced by composers as much as by natural objects and physical phenomena."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Other composers have taken this particular technique much further than I in the meantime, with the result that the Law of Diminishing Returns has begun to apply."
Author Name
Personal Development
"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."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Well, let me, first of all, say, that as a microtonal composer, I've never been much of a theorist."
Author Name
Personal Development
"Composers in the old days used to keep strictly to the base of the theme, as their real subject. Beethoven varies the melody, harmony and rhythms so beautifully."
Author Name
Personal Development
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