Composer Quotes - page 2

I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge. (Igor Stravinsky)

The real composer thinks about his work the whole time; he is not always conscious of this, but he is aware of it later when he suddenly knows what he will do.

Igor Stravinsky

The most uninteresting part of the biography of a composer is his childhood. All those preludes are the same and the reader hurries on to the fugue.

Dmitri Shostakovich

Many consider that Shostakovich is the greatest 20th-century composer. In his 15 symphonies, 15 quartets, and in other works he demonstrated mastery of the largest and most challenging forms with music of great emotional power and technical invention...All his works are marked by emotional extremes – tragic intensity, grotesque and bizarre wit, humour, parody, and savage sarcasm.

Dmitri Shostakovich

I like a composer called Henry Purcell, and I love to listen to Neil Young.

Cornelia Funke

Any subject is good for opera if the composer feels it so intently he must sing it out.

Gian Carlo Menotti

The great composer does not set to work because he is inspired, but becomes inspired because he is working.

Ernest Newman

The old idea of a composer suddenly having a terrific idea and sitting up all night to write it is nonsense. Nighttime is for sleeping.

Benjamin Britten

As a composer and as a musician I'm a true believer - and this is not to be overly diplomatic - I'm a believer that there's artistry in everything from a lawn gnome to a desk chair to a symphony to an Andy Warhol painting. There's art in absolutely everything.

Darren Criss

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

Alfred Schnittke

I am but an architectural composer. (Alexander Jackson Davis)

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

Cecilia Bartoli

I would still love to do more Handel. I think Handel was a fantastic composer. I did lots of Vivaldi, but it's also important to do the music of Handel, one of the greatest composers of the 18th century.

Cecilia Bartoli

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.

Carlisle Floyd

John Barry was the first film composer I was aware of. As a teenager I owned several of his Bond soundtracks.

Carter Burwell

I've always been a composer dependent on texts.

David Del Tredici

Which is why, in my lieder concerts, I always strove, when possible, to sing only the works of a single composer, so that the audience could be gradually drawn into a particular creative genius' way of thinking, and could follow him.

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

To me, all writing is like music. And especially dialogue. I studied music in college; that is what I wanted to be, a composer. Acting got me sidetracked.

Dirk Benedict

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

Esa-Pekka Salonen

I think that one of the things that influences me most as a composer is to what extent I can deconstruct and reconstruct the material that I'm working with.

Fred Frith

I am not so complicated or intelligent a composer, nor am I very interested in becoming so. I am much more happy doing what I know I can do than what I am not sure I could do. (Giorgio Moroder)

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

Gordon Getty

When my opera Plump Jack was performed in 1989, my first piano teacher sent me something that I'd composed when I was four. I remember I played it, and it still sounded like me. I'm the same composer I was then.

Gordon Getty

I began my career with infantile dreams of becoming a composer.

Ivor Novello

You become a great composer when you win a Pulitzer. But I think that now it's a completely meaningless award.

John Corigliano

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