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Quotes by Composer
"Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you'll find the real tinsel underneath."
24
"I was using tape loops for dancers and dance production. I had very funky primitive equipment, in fact technology wasn't very good no matter how much money you had."
23
"Like an apparently strict musical form it breaks the five minute whole into its structural parts - a descriptive preamble, the action of taking the cards, the development of the cards' manipulation and the revelation of what has been achieved."
23
"What came to me as a revelation was the use of rhythm in developing an overall structure in music."
23
"One bites into the brass mouthpiece of his wooden cudgel, and the other blows his cheeks out on a French horn. Do you call that Art?"
Art,
23
"Beauty and fullness of tone can be achieved by having the whole orchestra play with high clarinets and a carefully selected number of piccolos."
23
"In order to play and write, it's unique - you either do one or the other."
23
"Why do we pigeonhole and label an artist? It is a sure way of missing the important, the contradictory, the things that make him or her unique."
23
"The demands are related to their questing of the best possible out of the people concerned. It's this going for the highest possible factor that I'm very concerned about."
23
"I work very fast, keeping the ideas flowing but making sure they come out the way I intended."
23
"The luck of having talent is not enough; one must also have a talent for luck."
23
"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."
23
"I don't have ideas so much as there are things which constantly evolve... there are various threads or layers, if you like, which change."
23
"It is strange how one feels drawn forward without knowing at first where one is going."
23
"The longer you live and the more you learn, the more clearly you will feel the difference between the few men who are truly great and the mere virtuosi."
23
"The difference between the student and the born composer is he really hears the thing, and they have to stage it and manipulate it by technical equipment."
23
"Thanks to nanny, I've got a deep understanding of Russian tales."
23
"Music remains the most strange of the materials because we don't understand what happens when music moves you."
23
"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."
23
"The spirit can assert itself only through the medium of clear form."
23
"My wife volunteered her services as Red Cross nurse, insisting upon being sent to the front, in order to be as near me as could be, but it developed later that no nurse was allowed to go farther than the large troop hospitals far in the rear of the actual operations."
23
"When I dealt with set theory, I could never make it be the music that I wanted."
23
"And as far as the Disney Concert hall is concerned, it is a wonderful modern structure and I am extremely honored that I had this opportunity to have a concert here."
23
"Human nerves quickly get accustomed to the most unusual conditions and circumstances and I noticed that quite a number of men actually fell asleep from sheer exhaustion in the trenches, in spite of the roaring of the cannon about us and the whizzing of shrapnel over our heads."
23
"I recently did a piece for the Boston Pops and John Williams, and I hope that it's as well a composed piece as I've ever done for any other medium or occasion."
23
"Performing written music, even when I've written it, is not very interesting to me."
23
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