Composition Quotes

A Composition on the Piano

The proposed Constitution is, in strictness, neither a national nor a federal constitution; but a composition of both.

The composition is the organized sum of the interior functions of every part of the work.

When you feel like putting something into your picture or do not know what is the matter with it, take something out.

Composition is selective improvisation.

......so called “composition” becomes a personal thing, to be developed along with technique, as a personal way of seeing.

My greatest lesson in composition was looking at paintings.

One compositional element suggests and asks for another. This is what makes the activity interesting.

There is no field other than the weird in which I have any aptitude or inclination for fictional composition. Life has never interested me so much as the escape from life.

Composition has almost always been solitary.

A great composition to me is.. an incarnation of a genius, of all that was ever in him of the slightest consequence.

The composition of a tragedy requires testicles.

The right use of color can make any composition work.

A composition is an arrangement, built out of parts, that aims at seamlessness.

A curiosity prompt heightens the senses and hones compositional ability.

Good composition is merely the strongest way of seeing.

Even in front of nature one must compose.

I'd like to play for you one of my compositions, my only composition.

I put in my pictures everything I like. So much the worse for the things - they have to get along with one another.

Like many composers, most of my compositions are influenced by the music I've listened to throughout my life.

The act of composition is a series of discoveries.

My religion lies in my composition.

Watch the greater image materialize. You need that thing over there to tell you what to do about that thing over here.

No one has the Houdini school of composition.

The composition is already there, you just need to crop it

The severest critics are always those who have either never attempted, or who have failed in original composition.

One composition is meagre, though it has many figures; another is rich, though it has few.

Thank you Rob for the honor you have brought to our city with this oustanding composition.

An entire composition written in jazz could not live.

We are God's productions, His compositions.

The images are compositions of photos superimposed over painted backgrounds, then finished off with digital alterations.

Drawing and composition are the same thing.

Composition for me is, externally at least, scarcely distinguishable from catatonia.

Composition is frozen improvisation.

I don't think I differentiate between composition and improvisation. Improvisation could be a large part of a composition.

You should neither play bad compositions, nor, unless compelled, listen to them.

I took some comp for non-comp major classes with Giacomo Bracali and Ludmila Ulela, who was a really famous composition teacher.

I've always felt that there's a point where a piece seems to be alive, that is, living. And that's the point where I know the composition is finished.

You cannot separate the composition from the life of the moment. It is all one thing, to be decided in a split second while you're living through it.

How much finer things are in composition than alone.

I don't listen to much modern composition.

For my qualifying concert, Helmut Walcha would not coach Charles-Marie Widor or any American compositions. In his defense, his forte was Germanic composers, and his forte was really a fortissimo!

The oldest principle of composition: repeat everything.

That's what Samuel Johnson said: "Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think particularly fine, strike it out."

You have to know composition to be a good improviser.

Start with the foreground. Compositions fail when the foreground is treated as an afterthought.

The composition is the thing seen by everyone living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the composition that at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living.