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Quotes by Composer
"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."
28
"Has it struck you that the music which is regarded as the most sublime in western civilization, which is the music of Bach, is called baroque?"
28
"I'm trying to get hold of them... the trouble is a lot of the companies that recorded and produced the albums went bust, so I don't know where to get the masters."
28
"We felt we had to know something of his back story. I don't think people in the cinema would just accept that he's there. I think we had to learn how he (got there)."
28
"I had already done Rainbow in Curved Air and had a big record on CBS. I was launched to have a long career and then I just dropped out and went to India."
28
"This sounds horribly pretentious, but I like to think that if music hadn't existed, I could have invented it."
28
"But in the next world I shan't be doing music, with all the striving and disappointments. I shall be being it."
28
"I am fond of them, of the inferior beings of the abyss, of those who are full of longing."
28
"I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer."
28
"The Olympics are a wonderful metaphor for world cooperation, the kind of international competition that's wholesome and healthy, an interplay between countries that represents the best in all of us."
28
"Well the least favourite question is the one that one's asked particularly about in Japan is what's the difference between theatre and cinema and I think, well, that's about eighty bucks."
28
"First, it doesn't surprise me that traditional music has experienced a kind of exhaustion in the 20th century - not forgetting that many musicians started to look outside the traditional structures of tonality."
28
"This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before."
27
"I think the thing's that perhaps sad really is that younger people haven't come in and I think it must have been absolutely fantastic to have worked in the 50's when you had all of the great Broadway composers and when West Side Story didn't win the Tony Award."
27
"The academic area of new music or modern music festivals is not something which attracts me at all."
27
"Today each composer is not only involved in aesthetics, but he's actually trying to create his own language."
27
"That by listening to some music, by reading some books, by looking at paintings, and most important by hanging out with one another - by collaborating with one another and creating your own network - you can achieve something that is much better than what is out there."
27
"We will hang you, never fear, Most politely, most politely."
27
"I'd met Dr Dre, he was thinking about his next album, we talked a little and he said, 'Let me give you some of these loops and see what you come up with'."
27
"With Hitchcock I had little relationship. I was called to replace Bernard Herrmann, his favorite composer, in Torn Curtain, after the bitter fight between them."
27
"Now, there are sometimes making a connection between one section and another that sometimes you do want to see the pattern because it helps you to lead into the next thing - it's a rhetorical thing, where you just see how the pattern has to go into the next thing."
27
"The problem was the journalists who also did not understand much of my music, but they wrote about it. I think you fell into the usual trap laid out by parts of the press and other writers: that the poor musician has always to fight the evil companies and managers."
27
"I found a certain kind of music congenial to me; it never occurred to me to write music that was academically acceptable."
27
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