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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

"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

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

"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

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

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

"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 have tremendous respect for film composers."
Composer

"Art is not only about angst."
Art
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"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

"I have tremendous respect for film composers."
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

"I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First to discourage the composer from writing any more and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven."
Author Name
Personal Development

"When I began, the guitar was en-closed in a vicious circle. There were no composers writing for the guitar, be-cause there were no virtuoso guitarists."
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
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