top of page
.png){kind=small}
Quotes by Composer
"The Upper Bohemia people wore tuxedos in an art gallery, and Lower Bohemia was all of us."
35
"There are two sides to every question: my side and the wrong side."
35
"Certainly being in California has encouraged a sustained commitment to rethinking the nature, purposes, and relevance of the contemporary arts, specifically music, for a society which by and large seems to manage quite well without them."
35
"Some months ago, while I was preparing a new work, I told a young cinema executive my intention of including in a soundtrack two themes from Bach. But when he asked me which has been the last hit from that Bach?, then I knew that I had no longer place in cinema."
35
"I had all the normal interests - I played basketball and I headed the school paper. But I also developed very early a great love for music and literature and the theater."
35
"The idea of 'machine assemblage' is, especially, very alien to my sensibility, since it suggests a relative indifference of the strata to one another during the process of construction."
35
"Musicals are, by nature, theatrical, meaning poetic, meaning having to move the audience's imagination and create a suspension of disbelief, by which I mean there's no fourth wall."
35
"Every time I look at you I get a fierce desire to be lonesome."
35
"As a necessary prerequisite to the creation of new forms of expression one might, I suppose, argue that current sensibilities respond uniquely to the notion of exhaustion as exhaustion, although that does de facto seem rather limiting."
35
"Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art."
35
"How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling."
35
"One thing I've tried to do in writing music is take on very basic things, very archetypal things."
35
"We think the Puritans always dressed in black and white, which they didn't. They loved very bright colors. And there were other differences in perceptions that gave one a very different view of them."
35
"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."
35
"If the work of art is to continue pursuing the vision of both being in and of the world but nevertheless in some fashion being more than just one more object to the mounting clutter, this is the specific point, I think, where this must be assured."
35
"I like business and personal life to be distinct."
35
"By reason of weird translation, many such sets of instructions read like poems anyhow."
35
"I had piano lessons when I was a kid, like most people. And hated them, like most people. And quit, like most people."
35
"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."
34
"I frequently hear our present period described as uncertain, confused, chaotic."
34
"Characters are an extreme form in Shakespeare's theater."
34
"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."
34
"I remember once, when I started writing for the alto saxophone, a saxophonist told me to think of it as being like a cross between an oboe and a viola, but louder."
34
"I love music passionately. And because I love it I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it."
34
"It is rare that even a jazz musician finds an individual voice."
34
"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."
34
"Blacks are about seven times more likely to live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty than whites."
34
"I've been using the Mac solely for years, and got very comfortable with it."
34
bottom of page