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Quotes by Composer
"Music is the expression of the movement of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes."
26
"What I think of as style - and I've gotten to this over years of really thinking about it - is that style is the unconscious choices I make."
25
"Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors."
25
"If you come from Paris to Budapest you think you are in Moscow."
25
"Pay no attention to what the critics say; no statue has ever been put up to a critic."
25
"Mr. Wagner has beautiful moments but bad quarters of an hour."
25
"To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also."
25
"Recommend virtue to your children; it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience."
25
"Broad paths are open to every endeavour, and a sympathetic recognition is assured to every one who consecrates his art to the divine services of a conviction of a consciousness."
25
"Nowadays, there are sometimes more producers than there are people in the cast, because it takes that much money to put a show on."
25
"What I gave I have, what I spent I had, what I left I lost by not giving it."
25
"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."
25
"Musicians are always gigging and never have a chance to stop for a minute."
25
"What is American music? The most satisfying answer I've come across is that it was a kind of natural comfort with the vernacular which is diverse and regional; it's not one particular set of sounds."
24
"I've been living with the minor second all my life and I finally found a way to handle it."
24
"The greatest misfortune of the wise man and the greatest unhappiness of the fool are based upon convention."
24
"I learned from my uncle that jazz, like symphony music, was built to last."
24
"All that is not perfect down to the smallest detail is doomed to perish."
24
"A person of any mental quality has ideas of his own. This is common sense."
24
"Out of doing all that experimentation with sound I decided I wanted to do it with live musicians. To take repetition, take music fragments and make it live. Musicians would be able to play it and create this kind of abstract fabric of sound."
24
"The project which we developed, however, was for a sound piece and I was initially curious that a sculptor should be interested in working with a musician, especially on a project for radio."
24
"But you can't really know your audiences so well."
23
"We need improvement in the style of performance. There is no more advantage in a musician who plays and conducts than in one who is only a beater of rhythm."
23
"Real men are sadly lacking in this world, for when they are put to the test they prove worthless."
23
"In jazz, you listen to what the bass player is doing and what the drummer is doing, what the pianist and the guitarist is doing, and then you play something that compliments that, so you are thinking simultaneously and thinking ahead."
23
"One thing I've tried to do in writing music is take on very basic things, very archetypal things."
23
"After the Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution, songs became part of the story, as opposed to just entertainments in between comedy scenes."
23
"I didn't want much. I wanted much more. In fact, I wanted everything."
23
"Everyone is born with genius, but most people only keep it a few minutes."
23
"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."
23
"You might lose your spontaneity and, instead of composing first-rate Gershwin, end up with second rate Ravel."
22
"The idea in The Man that Would Be King was that the music should recreate all that majestic surrounding and emphasize the adventure, but also speak about the frustration or, rather said, the curse of both protagonists, even before happened what happens them."
22
"All the best performers bring to their role something more, something different than what the author put on paper. That's what makes theatre live. That's why it persists."
22
"I worked hard. Anyone who works as hard as I did can achieve the same results."
22
"Money may kindle, but it cannot by itself, and for very long, burn."
22
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