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Composer Quotes


"Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries."


"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."


"I was not influenced by composers as much as by natural objects and physical phenomena."


"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 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."


"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."


"I've heard though that there is a younger generation of tonal French composers who are reacting with vigour."


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


"Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules... Mathematicians are more like classical composers."


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


"Well, let me, first of all, say, that as a microtonal composer, I've never been much of a theorist."


"Many, many composers have only found their way to a certain form, through familiarizing themselves with texts."


"Pianists call me a composer, composers call me a pianist. The classicists think me a futurist, and the futurists call me a reactionary."
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