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Quotes by Composer
"Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries."
56
"Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don't like, it's always by Villa-Lobos?"
54
"Spring won't let me stay in this house any longer! I must get out and breathe the air deeply again."
54
"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."
53
"Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced."
53
"Music is the expression of the movement of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes."
53
"The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing."
52
"Life that only a few hours before had glowed with enthusiasm and exultation, suddenly paled and sickened."
51
"Why waste money on psychotherapy when you can listen to the B Minor Mass?"
50
"There is no doubt that the first requirement for a composer is to be dead."
49
"We appropriately compared the lifestyle to that of drug addiction and alcoholism - lifestyles that one would be encouraged to seek help to leave - never encouraged to stay in."
49
"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."
49
"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."
49
"I probably went to musique concrete concerts - though not the very first ones - at the beginning of the 50s."
48
"Music, which should pulsate with life, needs new means of expression, and science alone can infuse it with youthful vigor."
48
"To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also."
48
"And harmony means that the relationship between all the elements used in a composition is balanced, is good."
48
"Conductors don't suffer, they are part of the performance."
48
"Oscar Hammerstein was a surrogate father during all those many days, and weeks and months when I didn't see my own father."
47
"I don't listen to recordings of my songs. I don't avoid it, I just don't go out of my way to do it."
47
"Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy."
47
"I frequently compose out the entire metric structure of a piece in modified cyclic form, where each cyclic revolution undergoes some form of 'variation' much as if measure lengths were concrete musical 'material.'"
47
"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."
46
"The greatest misfortune of the wise man and the greatest unhappiness of the fool are based upon convention."
46
"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."
46
"Almost every one of my various zero numbered birthdays has had a big concert in London and often in Paris."
46
"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."
46
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