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I loved Hendrix. I mean, really, really loved him. As if he were one of the great classical composers. And he was. That's how I saw him.
Author:
Warren Zevon
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We teach young kids from 8 to 14 or 15 about their musical heritage through great songs written by American songwriters. We don't do too many modern composers, although we include songs from Billy Joel and other writers like him.
Author:
Margaret Whiting
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I think the thing's that perhaps sad really is that younger people haven't come in and I think it must have been absolutely fantastic to have worked in the 50's when you had all of the great Broadway composers and when West Side Story didn't win the Tony Award.
Author:
Andrew Webber
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I was not influenced by composers as much as by natural objects and physical phenomena.
Author:
Edgard Varese
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Composers love to write for symphony orchestras because the symphony is the Rolls Royce of musical instruments.
Author:
David Tredici
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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.
Author:
David Tredici
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I began like all composers, writing for small groups. Chamber groups.
Author:
David Tredici
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But still as compared to many, many orchestras in the world, I think you find a lot more new music and living composers on our programs than many other places.
Author:
Michael Thomas
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The first year I started in San Francisco, there was an American work on every program and there's been a lot of music by living composers and gradually that was part of the process of getting the audience really to trust me.
Author:
Michael Thomas
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All of these people kept on being professional musicians and composers in the strictest sense.
Author:
James Tenney
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Composers are the only people who can hear good music above bad sounds.
Author:
John Sousa
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America can well expect to develop a goodly amount of composers for she has a goodly number of people.
Author:
John Sousa
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Sincere composers believe in God.
Author:
John Sousa
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Composers are not all good conductors.
Author:
Anton Seidl
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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.
Author:
Anton Seidl
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When I began, the guitar was en-closed in a vicious circle. There were no composers writing for the guitar, be-cause there were no virtuoso guitarists.
Author:
Andres Segovia
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Many composers today don't know what the human throat is.
Author:
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf
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The record company started as an adjunct to that, to give young composers their first recorded performances; to give young musicians their first debut on a recording. These are all things that big record companies would never touch because there is no money in it!
Author:
Gunther Schuller
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Pianists call me a composer, composers call me a pianist. The classicists think me a futurist, and the futurists call me a reactionary.
Author:
Anton Rubinstein
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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.
Author:
Maurice Ravel
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A hundred years ago, of course, the question that the German Composers' Co-operative asked itself sounded a lot more fundamental: How do you create a fair share for those who ensure that works can actually be performed at all?
Author:
Johannes Rau
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Composers today get a TV script on Friday and have to record on Tuesday. It's just dreadful to impose on gifted talent and expect decent music under these conditions.
Author:
Alex North
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The Russian composers, especially, tricked the symphony orchestra into the kind of dynamic, rhythmic thing.
Author:
Gerry Mulligan
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So many of the sounds that contemporary composers were trying to create were to be found in the traditional musics of the world. That was encouraging but also little daunting to think that you had to work so hard to be new and yet it was old.
Author:
Robert Morris
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Good writers are monotonous, like good composers. They keep trying to perfect the one problem they were born to understand.
Author:
Alberto Moravia
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What inspires me is not so much the music as the opportunity to interact with composers. I think that has driven everything I've done.
Author:
Robert Moog
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Music is a continuum and the modern and avant-garde composers of today will be part of the standard repertoire 30 years from now.
Author:
Neville Marriner
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I would advise my young colleagues, the composers of symphonies, to drop in sometimes at the kindergarten, too. It is there that it is decided whether there will be anybody to understand their works in twenty years' time.
Author:
Zoltan Kodaly
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There are no black film composers doing the likes of Star Wars, doing the likes of E.T., doing the likes of Jurassic Park. There are none, nor will there ever be one. That ain't about to happen!
Author:
J. Johnson
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Nobody can give a good performance unless the authors and composers have written a good part, a fact which is often overlooked.
Author:
Judy Holliday
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Composers, like authors, have a lot in common. Our main goal is to connect with the listener emotionally.
Author:
Ken Hill
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I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First to discourage the composer from writing any more and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven.
Author:
Jascha Heifetz
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I was always drawn to Broadway musicals, and obviously composers like Gershwin, Rodgers, Berlin and Porter were writing music that I found wildly impressive.
Author:
Marvin Hamlisch
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I've got a collection of songs that I've had, I keep adding to and they're all great American composers. I wanted to showcase American composers and I've done that on a lot of my records and played things by American composers that I really respect.
Author:
Charlie Haden
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Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules... Mathematicians are more like classical composers.
Author:
Brian Greene
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A characteristic of older folksongs, in most cases, is that we don't know their composers or authors. Older folksongs were written often with no commercial purpose in mind. They were passed down by word of mouth, from generation to generation.
Author:
Tom Glazer
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I feel that I belong to the 19th century. Some composers' music is very topical. It almost says, 'This is about what I read in newspapers yesterday.' Not mine.
Author:
Gordon Getty
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It's amazing how fast generations lose sight of other generations. One of the first things the young composers who come to work with me say is that they want to write music people will like, instead of gaining their credentials by being rejected by the audience.
Author:
Carlisle Floyd
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Most of the important composers in our country are clustered in the Northeast.
Author:
Carlisle Floyd
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When the Domaine Musical started up, I wasn't part of it. They were the major players in contemporary music at that time, braodcasting old and new composers' work. And I wasn't one of them.
Author:
Luc Ferrari
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Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries.
Author:
Brian Ferneyhough
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Other composers have taken this particular technique much further than I in the meantime, with the result that the Law of Diminishing Returns has begun to apply.
Author:
Brian Ferneyhough
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The Western musical canon came about not merely by accumulation, but by opposition and subversion, both to the ruling powers on whom composers depended for their livelihoods and to other musics.
Author:
Brian Ferneyhough
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We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.
Author:
Brian Eno
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I think a lot of composers get into trouble just making up a plot and expecting an audience to follow that.
Author:
John Eaton
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Well, the very best operas are the ones written by the very best composers.
Author:
John Eaton
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Composers are always going back to the past.
Author:
Anne Dudley
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Composers shouldn't think too much - it interferes with their plagiarism.
Author:
Howard Dietz
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Many, many composers have only found their way to a certain form, through familiarizing themselves with texts.
Author:
Dietrich Dieskau
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Although technical discussions are interesting to composers, I suspect that the truly magical and spiritual powers of music arise from deeper levels of our psyche.
Author:
George Crumb
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I am certain that most composers today would consider today's music to be rich, not to say confusing, in its enormous diversity of styles, technical procedures, and systems of esthetics.
Author:
George Crumb
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Perhaps two million years ago the creatures of a planet in some remote galaxy faced a musical crisis similar to that which we earthly composers face today.
Author:
George Crumb
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I have tremendous respect for film composers.
Author:
John Corigliano
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The structural thinking I use in the concert hall is unnecessary to most film projects, and most film composers make better use of the enormous range of pop and other materials and techniques required of them than I probably would, faced with the same challenge.
Author:
John Corigliano
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Gifted women musicians and composers rarely received their due.
Author:
James Cook
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There's a higher place that I have no illusions about reaching. There's a sophistication and aesthetic about composers who only write only for the music's sake.
Author:
Bill Conti
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Let us not forget that the greatest composers were also the greatest thieves. They stole from everyone and everywhere.
Author:
Pablo Casals
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In Hollywood, the rainbow hits the ground for composers.
Author:
Hoagy Carmichael
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I don't use composers. I research music the way I research the photographs or the facts in my scripts.
Author:
Ken Burns
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I've heard though that there is a younger generation of tonal French composers who are reacting with vigour.
Author:
Gavin Bryars
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Still, American composers working in France have had a pretty hard time.
Author:
Gavin Bryars
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Composers in the old days used to keep strictly to the base of the theme, as their real subject. Beethoven varies the melody, harmony and rhythms so beautifully.
Author:
Johannes Brahms
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When you have great songs that are going to live longer than the composers, everything you can do to bring those different elements and nuances out, serve the song.
Author:
Michael Bolton
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Living composers writing for big band are very few and far between. There are not a lot of them, and I have a talent for doing it. I am zeroing in on what I do best.
Author:
Carla Bley
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Music is at once the product of feeling and knowledge, for it requires from its disciples, composers and performers alike, not only talent and enthusiasm, but also that knowledge and perception which are the result of protracted study and reflection.
Author:
Alban Berg
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Composers should write tunes that chauffeurs and errand boys can whistle.
Author:
Thomas Beecham
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I still the love classic period, but also the baroque period, and even 17th-Century music such as the music of Monteverdi. He's one of the greatest opera composers. He was the one who really started the opera.
Author:
Cecilia Bartoli
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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.
Author:
Cecilia Bartoli
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Then I started listenin' a lot to classical composers. Piano works. Just to see what they were doin'. That sort of put me in a different groove to try to blend all that in.
Author:
Mose Allison
