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Quotes by Composer
"A plague on eminence! I hardly dare cross the street anymore without a convoy, and I am stared at wherever I go like an idiot member of a royal family or an animal in a zoo; and zoo animals have been known to die from stares."
76
"Spring won't let me stay in this house any longer! I must get out and breathe the air deeply again."
73
"Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don't like, it's always by Villa-Lobos?"
72
"The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing."
72
"Music, which should pulsate with life, needs new means of expression, and science alone can infuse it with youthful vigor."
68
"Life that only a few hours before had glowed with enthusiasm and exultation, suddenly paled and sickened."
68
"Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced."
68
"Oscar Hammerstein was a surrogate father during all those many days, and weeks and months when I didn't see my own father."
67
"I guess we've had a very close relationship because I don't pretend to know about cinema and I think I do know a bit about theatre but he does, he respected that and so we really just had a collaboration which went completely like this."
66
"The whole problem of the sound-work is distancing oneself from the dramatic."
66
"If an American audience is given a serious musical theater piece that is well produced, dramatically gripping and wonderfully acted, they'll respond to it."
65
"I probably went to musique concrete concerts - though not the very first ones - at the beginning of the 50s."
65
"To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also."
65
"Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy."
65
"Conductors don't suffer, they are part of the performance."
65
"Above all things, I must not get angry. If I do get angry I knock all the teeth out of the mouth of the poor wretch who has angered me."
Poor,
64
"Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries."
64
"I was not influenced by composers as much as by natural objects and physical phenomena."
64
"And harmony means that the relationship between all the elements used in a composition is balanced, is good."
63
"Mozart wrote so many works in his thirty-five years that it would take a lifetime just to write out the notes. We literally do not know how he did it."
63
"The totality of a record is usually beyond ones ability to imagine when you start working on it, but the component parts are, usually, fairly clear one way or another."
63
"Recommend virtue to your children; it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience."
62
"For Debussy the musician and the man I have had profound admiration, but by nature I'm different from him. I think I have always personally followed a direction opposed to that of the symbolism of Debussy."
62
"Music is the expression of the movement of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes."
62
"Musicals are plays, but the last collaborator is your audience, so you've got to wait 'til the last collaborator comes in before you can complete the collaboration."
61
"Yes, I was invited to make the sound environment at a booth of a huge electronic company, during the Hanover Industrial Fair in 1973. It was a job. Slightly good paid. But not as much as my producer then told the press."
61
"I learned from my uncle that jazz, like symphony music, was built to last."
61
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