top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Composer
"Recommend virtue to your children; it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience."
54
"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."
54
"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,
53
"Almost every one of my various zero numbered birthdays has had a big concert in London and often in Paris."
53
"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."
53
"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."
52
"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."
52
"What that book does for me is give me the tools in the same way that I had the tools when I learned the regular scales or the alphabet. If you give me the tools, the syntax, and the grammar, it still doesn't tell me how to write Ulysses."
52
"The whole problem of the sound-work is distancing oneself from the dramatic."
52
"There's something inimical about the camera and song."
52
"Then, in 1983 I went on a very long concert tour all over Europe."
52
"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."
51
"For me it's the instrument. If I want to think of a flute and the state of the arts I hear a vibrato; I don't know what a flute is unless the person plays it for me."
51
"My intention here is to make it clear that not a single cell of my composition, here in regard to The Raven, is found by chance or intuition, that the composition moved towards perfection with the precision and inevitability of a mathematical equation."
51
"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.'"
51
"Never let oneself be guided by the opinion of one's contemporaries. Continue steadfastly on one's way."
51
"It is easier to achieve a desired result in short pieces."
50
"I am hitting my head against the walls, but the walls are giving way."
50
"When I was in Paris, all of the German refugees began to flow in and it was a very sad time."
50
"All that is not perfect down to the smallest detail is doomed to perish."
50
"I worked hard. Anyone who works as hard as I did can achieve the same results."
50
"Money may kindle, but it cannot by itself, and for very long, burn."
50
"The dumbing down of the country reflects itself on Broadway. The shows get dumber, and the public gets used to them."
50
"The nice thing about doing a crossword puzzle is, you know there is a solution."
50
"Achievements, seldom credited to their source, are the result of unspeakable drudgery and worries."
50
"Everyone is born with genius, but most people only keep it a few minutes."
50
"I was a crazy young man who let himself be blinded by his passions and obeyed only the impulses of the moment."
50
"Melodic invention is one of the surest signs of a divine gift."
50
"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."
49
"Behind the phony tinsel of Hollywood lies the real tinsel."
49
"If you come from Paris to Budapest you think you are in Moscow."
49
"Mr. Wagner has beautiful moments but bad quarters of an hour."
49
"Unending was the stream, unending the misery, unending the sorrow."
49
"I always try to think of a vocabulary to match different musical situations."
49
"After the Rodgers and Hammerstein revolution, songs became part of the story, as opposed to just entertainments in between comedy scenes."
49
bottom of page