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Quotes by Composer
"Verse, singing, and speech have a common origin."
34
"The past nine years in San Diego have represented such a period of questioning."
34
"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."
33
"The worst thing you can do is censor yourself as the pencil hits the paper. You must not edit until you get it all on paper. If you can put everything down, stream-of-consciousness, you'll do yourself a service."
33
"Allen Ginsberg was a world authority on the writing of William Blake, and had an incredible knowledge of classic literature and world politics."
33
"Three days in a city now and I'm quite flipped. There's too much noise. I just can't do with it."
Now,
33
"Once Dwight Eisenhower makes up his mind, he's full of indecision."
33
"Negative things, and they were all deliberate and I'm not going to say who they were but I know who they were and it was in the business, and that's not a good sign."
33
"He who praises you for what you lack wishes to take from you what you have."
33
"The French Revolution is the ultimate modernist statement. Destroy everything. Don't build on the past. There is no past."
33
"The music of the Gypsies belongs in the sphere of improvisation rather than in any other, without which it would have no power to exist."
33
"There are always things to examine. What's great is not feeling that I have to refuse any of them. Maybe no good from a PR perspective, but from the point of view of everyday life, it keeps things interesting."
33
"I thought in terms of the enthusiasm of doing it. I didn't think about whether I was ready."
33
"All my music is very simple in that melody is usually clearly stated."
33
"This is not to say that the Scots are not fine people, but they were all sort of... well, my grandfather was a minister and sort of Protestant, and this was rather depressing to me."
33
"I never feel that my music is sparse or minimalist; the way fat people never really think they're fat. I certainly don't consider myself minimalist at all."
33
"I felt alienated at school, and I never did well with girls."
33
"I don't want to wear my compositional tools on my sleeve."
33
"In the Rodgers and Hammerstein generation, popular hits came out of shows and movies."
33
"I think things changed as a result of a certain perception of our politics. When we went through our zealous, self-righteous period it didn't exactly win us any friends."
33
"In the nineteenth century the more grandiose word inspiration began to replace the word idea in the arts."
32
"As I sit down and start to work, I often panic. I stare at the empty piece of music paper. How can I say that my piece will be ready for performance next January when I do not have a recipe for making it happen?"
32
"Take a sound from whatever source, a note on a violin, a scream, a moan, a creaking door, and there is always this symmetry between the sound basis, which is complex and has numerous characteristics which emerge through a process of comparison within our perception."
32
"Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning."
32
"I was interested in opera and it seemed to me that the only possible theatre for contemporary opera would be television. So I started working towards a kind of television kind of opera."
32
"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."
32
"Eighty percent of my pieces gravitate towards an A, as a tonal thing, not at the beginning, but somewhere in it."
32
"A few years later, my Uncle David took me to the Earle Theatre to hear Duke Ellington."
32
"I beg of you... never assume an inner or an outer pose, never a disguise."
32
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