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Quotes by Composer
"In my piano concerto I developed this polyphony to much higher complexity."
15
"I work very fast, keeping the ideas flowing but making sure they come out the way I intended."
15
"In its beginnings, music was merely chamber music, meant to be listened to in a small space by a small audience."
15
"Music can also be a sensual pleasure, like eating food or sex. But its highest vibration for me is that point of taking us to a real understanding of something in our nature which we can very rarely get at. It is a spiritual state of oneness."
15
"I listen to all kinds of music - new music, old music, music of my colleagues, everything."
15
"I wish to share and pass down some of my generation's traits, and encourage young people to create their own art, music, and literature."
15
"In mainstream romantic comedies, I'm usually tearing my hair out. It's just a devastatingly difficult genre for me."
15
"When I was confronted with official tuition, the academic thing, I could see no relationship whatever between that and the music I'd been writing since I was 11."
15
"You know, nobody eats in England. Three or four pints of English beer a night fills you. I can't say I'm very impressed with the food in America. it's all sort of bland. Like turkey sandwiches."
15
"I write bars, for the musicians, because they have to be together."
15
"You can't have personal investors anymore because it's too expensive, so you have to have corporate investment or a lot of rich people."
15
"Musicals are, by nature, theatrical, meaning poetic, meaning having to move the audience's imagination and create a suspension of disbelief, by which I mean there's no fourth wall."
15
"Hence my obstinate emphasis on stylistic continuity from work to work rather than specific sibling relationships between the individual work and other members of its stylistic 'family' in the world outside."
15
"I had been interested in Indian music and I actually started studying Tableaus before I met him."
15
"And I'll never forget the first time I took the possibility to project sound every day for six or seven hours with special devices which were built for me."
15
"People who share the same language, French or Chinese or whatever, have the same vocal cords and emit sounds which are basically the same, as they come from the same throats and lungs."
15
"I don't let myself get carried away by my own ideas - I abandon 19 out of 20 of them every day."
15
"When I first wrote for orchestra, I didn't realize, when you have 20 people playing a violin line, that is very different than one person playing that line."
15
"I come from a background of experimental music which mingled real sounds together with musical sounds."
15
"A great poet is the most precious jewel of a nation."
15
"He who praises you for what you lack wishes to take from you what you have."
15
"A theatre receives recognition through its initiative, which is indispensable for first-rate performances."
15
"The French Revolution is the ultimate modernist statement. Destroy everything. Don't build on the past. There is no past."
15
"I have always loved Scottish music - all sorts of Celtic, Gaelic music."
15
"When I was speaking about communicating, I meant that the listener - we have to reach the listener; otherwise, of course, you're writing the piece, as I say, only for the satisfaction of seeing it on the paper for yourself, and then it ends right there."
15
"Then, when the Depression came, all of this changed completely. Since that time, the entire public is of a very different sort and there was not so much support for contemporary music in a direct way."
15
"Since age seven, I've been composing and have never stopped composing, yet, the creative process is as elusive to me as it has ever been."
Age,
15
"I like what I hear as a resulting combination of these two strands... something of a combination of familiarity and, for lack of a better word, strangeness."
15
"It is conceivable that what is unified form to the author or composer may of necessity be formless to his audience."
15
"Esquire, in a July, 1957 issue, has a photograph of me playing the French horn at the Five Spot."
July,
15
"That is the way a great master carpenter feels, or an architect or composer or anyone who creates anything - people want to be appreciated for what they have done."
15
"Let people have an education and you can't stop them."
15
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