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Quotes by Composer
"I had piano lessons when I was a kid, like most people. And hated them, like most people. And quit, like most people."
19
"I would not say that I was, these days, a 'student' of philosophy, although in my youth I was quite deeply involved with certain aspects of the British pragmatists."
19
"Like any other composer of opera, I choose a subject not for polemical reasons, but because it contains vivid characters in highly charged dramatic situations."
18
"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."
18
"Allen Ginsberg was a world authority on the writing of William Blake, and had an incredible knowledge of classic literature and world politics."
18
"In art there are only fast or slow developments. Essentially it is a matter of evolution, not revolution."
18
"It is impossible to imagine a more complete fusion with nature than that of the Gypsy."
18
"Every great inspiration is but an experiment."
18
"But I'm an adventurer. I like invention, I like discovery."
18
"I was blown away by the standing ovation. I've had tributes before, sure, but I don't retain that feeling, and I wasn't prepared for it on Tuesday. But maybe you shouldn't retain these things or you'd be on a permanent high."
18
"How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling."
18
"If you think you might have secret information listening to me, you're lost."
18
"Tones sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes."
18
"I also used these realistic sounds in a psychological way. With The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, I used animal sounds - as you say, the coyote sound - so the sound of the animal became the main theme of the movie."
18
"My own position is, that it is largely up to the work itself to suggest the nature of these referential points without dimensions in and through the processes by which the distance between them is maintained."
18
"I have just begun a work in which an important part is given to a large chorus and with it I want to use several of your instruments - augmenting their range as in those I used for my Equatorial - especially in the high range."
18
"We all shared an admiration of Debussy both as a musician and as sort of an icon for the 20th century. It seemed like an interesting idea to go right back 100 years to find the source of some new ideas now."
18
"One of the things I particularly enjoyed doing was taking raw sound from locations during the film, like the candy machine, and writing pieces of music to go with them, which is totally unnecessary within the context of the film, because they have their own logic."
18
"So many good songs get written fast, because you know exactly what has to work."
18
"I suppose that the scope and implications of such forces have rendered my personal accounting ritual pretty much obsolete. That's how things sometimes go."
18
"What a beautiful art, but what a wretched profession."
18
"I was a crazy young man who let himself be blinded by his passions and obeyed only the impulses of the moment."
18
"Never let oneself be guided by the opinion of one's contemporaries. Continue steadfastly on one's way."
18
"This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before."
17
"Sometimes I write them down in musical notation as a trigger to remind me about certain directions to go. Or I can be specific about a sound I'm looking for."
17
"You can see my decision as either a distinctive factor or as a limitation. I don't feel it is a limitation."
17
"John Barry was my hero when I was about 13. His scores to the James Bond movies were the scores of my life back then."
17
"Eighty percent of my pieces gravitate towards an A, as a tonal thing, not at the beginning, but somewhere in it."
17
"Perhaps of all the most basic elements of music, rhythm most directly affects our central nervous system."
17
"The one book necessary to be understood by a divine, is the Bible; any others are to be read, chiefly, in order to understand that."
17
"A few years later, my Uncle David took me to the Earle Theatre to hear Duke Ellington."
17
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