Composer Quotes

What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.

The terror of performing never goes away. Instead, you get very, very comfortable being terrified.

It may well be that some composers do not believe in God. All of them, however, believe in Bach.

Well, American composers are the best composers. At this time in the world, we are where the energy is. We are the most diverse, the most iconoclastic, the most maverick, and the most skillful.

I am but an architectural composer.

We consider Monteverdi the first composer of opera. There was someone before, but everything started with Monteverdi.

To be a success as a Broadway composer, you must be Jewish or gay. I'm both.

Of all composers, past and present, I am the least learned. I mean that in all seriousness, and by learning I do not mean knowledge of music.

A lot of composers before me have been on this mission to change the world by getting off equal temperament, and I'm definitely one of those.

Händel is the greatest and ablest of all composers; from him I can still learn.

The greatest composer does not sit down to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working.

Stravinsky the composer I worship. Stravinsky the thinker I despise.

Music was not invented by the composer, but found.

When I am with composers, I say I am a conductor. When I am with conductors, I say I am a composer.

My dream was always to be a composer, but fashion came very easily.

Freddie Bryant is a brilliant young guitarist and composer.

I shall be the first composer in history not to have a biography.

I am a composer in search of oblivion; and I'm always slightly ashamed to admit that I compose.

There are no woman composers, never have been and possibly never will be.

A good composer is slowly discovered and a bad composer is slowly found out.

He's not a performer, he's not a composer, he's not even a musician, but Norman Granz is Mr. Jazz.

Gifted women musicians and composers rarely received their due.

Claude Debussy was a rare phenomenon a composer profoundly and subversively revolutionary.

A large part of my work has been collaborating with composers; I think we've commissioned about 140 pieces now, a lot of them percussion concertos.

The present day composer refuses to die.

The composer makes plans, music laughs.

I tend to listen to the classical composers: Rachmaninov, Satie.

It is the power of music to carry one directly into the mental state of the composer.

You can't have Bach, Mozart and Beethoven as your favorite composers. They simply define what music is!

I was not influenced by composers as much as by natural objects and physical phenomena.

The three greatest composers are Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. All the others are cretins.

Brahms' Variations are better than mine, but mine were written before his.

I am not one of the great composers. All the great have produced enormously. There is everything in their work - the best and the worst, but there is always quantity. But I have written relatively little.

Composers combine notes, that's all.

I just have to take my chances like any other composer.

composition is notation of distortion of what composers think they've heard before. Masterpieces are marvelous misquotations.

Music is at once the product of feeling and knowledge.

Composers are the only people who can hear good music above bad sounds.

To judge a composer's work, one must consider it as a whole.

Many composers today don't know what the human throat is.

In Hollywood, the rainbow hits the ground for composers.

The further the music develops, the more complex the apparatus used by the composer to express his thoughts becomes.

Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries.

I feel very free and very happy to be a composer.

The composers could no longer direct all performances in person, and so the responsibility of interpreting their works in the spirit in which they had been conceived was placed upon conductors.

Still, American composers working in France have had a pretty hard time.

Do you know that my very first experience as a composer was a 'Concerto for Accordion?

Nobody can give a good performance unless the authors and composers have written a good part, a fact which is often overlooked.

I think it's good for the composer to teach because you always have new students and you have to begin at the beginning and make things clear.

Composers are always going back to the past.