20th-century Composer Quotes

Satyajit Ray

Sergei Prokofiev

George Gershwin

Carl Orff

Andrew Lloyd Webber

Dave Brubeck

Thelonious Monk

"Cage's Music of Changes was a further indication that the arts in general were beginning to consciously deal with the "given" material and, to varying degrees, liberating them from the inherited, functional concepts of control."

This fact, the surfacing of structure in an undeliberate action, is too big to take on here, but it was enough to convince me that the structuralists—the advocates of planning music before you hear or care what the plan gives you—were right: do not rely on unplanned music; it comes out as though it were planned, but planned by someone you cross the street to avoid.

There is no doubt that the first requirement for a composer is to be dead.

Arthur Honegger

So bless, you my darling, my angel,
Heaven is mine and life is divine with you.

The sun has got its hat on
Hip hip hip hooray
The sun has got its hat on
And it's coming out to play.

Composing a piece of music is very feminine. It is sensitive, emotional, contemplative. By comparison, doing housework is positively masculine.

The birds are the opposite of time. They represent our longing for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant song.

Olivier Messiaen

My boyfriend dumped me. My best friend won't talk to me. My future is in a garbage can. Everything has turned to crap. Can you please just let me be a sullen teenager. just this once

What we ask of music, first and last, is that it communicate experience - experience of all kinds, vital and profound at its greatest, amusing or entertaining at another level.

What is called the serenity of age is only perhaps a euphemism for the fading power to feel the sudden shock of joy or sorrow.

Do I love you because you're beautiful, or are you beautiful because I love you?

Richard Rodgers

The number of interviews I've ever given could be counted on the fingers of my hands.

They're creepy and they're kooky,
Mysterious and spooky,
They're all together ooky,
The Addams Family.

None but the most blindly credulous will imagine the characters and events in this story to be anything but fictitious. It is true that the ancient and noble city of Oxford is, of all the towns of England, the likeliest progenitor of unlikely events and persons. But there are limits.

You're a man, and that's a bonus
'Cause when you're swinging your cojones
You'll show 'em what testosterone is.

Form is a theatrical event of a certain length, and the length itself may be unpredictable.

Christian Wolff

My purpose is to create music not for snobs, but for all people, music which is beautiful and healing. To attempt what old Chinese painters called 'spirit resonance' in melody and sound.

The only thing wrong with performing was that you couldn't phone it in.

When discussing a march that he had composed for his regiment:

General: Isn't it a little fast, Korngold? The men can't march to that.
Korngold: Ah yes, well, you see Sir, this was composed for the retreat.

Do I have to tell you about the spiritual cannibalism of the culture, our culture, which has been bombarding us with ultrasensory overstimulation aiming to reprocess us into full-time consumption machines, stealing above all from us our time (not an inch of time without an imprint of message), and even our very sense of time (to be measured in lengths of no more than one message unit each) under the guise of entertainment, and even of 'art,' commoditizing the eternal, hyping the primal? Our time is the sine qua non of our identity. We need to take extreme measures to reclaim it for ourselves and each other.

Benjamin Boretz

Collaboration is being open to each other's ideas and benefiting from each other's perspectives in an open way. Collaboration is all about rewriting and rewriting and rewriting and helping each other to constantly improve a piece. And, it's also about spurring each other on to doing really great, hard work — it's easier to do it in a collaboration than on your own.

A child isn't born bitter. I point no fingers as to who tainted the clean, pure pool of my childhood. Let's just say that when I realized that I didn't want to grow up, the damage was already done. Knowing that being grown up was no swell place to be means that you are grown up enough to notice. And you can't go back from there. You have to forge another route, draw your own map.

Life is just a bowl of cherries,
Don't take it serious; it's too mysterious.

Through the years we all will be together,
If the Fates allow.
Hang a shining star upon the highest bough,
And have yourself a merry little Christmas now.

Why waste money on psychotherapy when you can listen to the B Minor Mass?