20th-century Composer Quotes

Perfection is no more a requisite to art than to heroes. Frigidaires are perfect. Beauty limps. My frigidaire has had to be replaced.

In the future (...) people will become more sensitive and aware than they are now. They will have to, because society will become more complicated, more full of people, with more different things happening. People will have to become much cleverer and much sharper. Then they will like my music.

Verbal communication about music is impossible except among musicians.

Too many years fighting back tears. Why can't the past just die? Wishing you were somehow here again, knowing we must say goodbye. Try to forgive, teach me to live, give me the strength to try! No more memories, no more silent tears, no more gazing across the wasted years. Help me say goodbye.

Andrew Lloyd Webber

My work is a complex product of a personality continuous with all of nature, and one making progressively better-integrated efforts to structure experience on all levels.... My art is the result of a deeply personal, infinitely complex, and still essentially mysterious, exploration of experience. No words will ever touch it.

Music is mathematics, the mathematics of listening, mathematics for the ears.

Karlheinz Stockhausen

What do you think happens to a composer who is sincere and loves to write and has to wait thirty years to have someone play a piece of his music? Had I been born in a different country or had I been born white, I am sure I would have expressed my ideas long ago. Maybe they wouldn't have been as good because when people are born free — I can't imagine it, but I've got a feeling that if it's so easy for you — the struggle and the initiative are not as strong as they are for a person who has to struggle and therefore has more to say.

Starting a piece is the worst, and that can stretch from one day to three weeks of agony. The cats run and hide.

Jennifer Higdon

Love is born of faith, lives on hope, and dies of charity.

Gian Carlo Menotti

This is my best work, but only because The Flaming Angel is my greatest.

Sergei Prokofiev

Pardon me boy is that the Chattanooga Choo-choo,
Track twenty nine,
Boy you can gimme a shine.
I can afford to board a Chattanooga Choo-choo,
I've got my fare and just a trifle to spare.
You leave the Pennsylvania station 'bout a quarter to four,
Read a magazine and then you're in Baltimore,
Dinner in the diner nothing could be finer
Than to have your ham'n eggs in Carolina.

An ideal world can definitely be created with a pure mind and optimistic results.

Men grow cold as girls grow old
And we all lose our charms in the end.
But square cut or pear shape,
These rocks won't lose their shape,
Diamonds are a girl's best friend.

I was once married to a woman who could eat anything and tell you what was in it: the most complicated recipes. Her memory of taste - now that's what I call memory!

Zip a dee doo dah,
Zip a dee ay,
My, oh my, what a wonderful day.

When played at the right sound level, which is quite high and exciting, the tones in this music will cause your ears to act as neurophonic instruments that emit sounds that will seem to be issuing directly from your head.

Maryanne Amacher

The real geniuses know where their writing has to be good and where they can get away with some mediocrity.

Dmitri Shostakovich

His partitioning of the octave in the first ten bars places Varèse with Scriabin and the Schoenberg circle among the revolutionary composers whose work initiates the beginning of a new mainstream tradition in the music of our century.

I am often asked why I nearly always select old material, fairy tales and legends for my stage works. I do not look upon them as old, but rather as valid material. The time element disappears, and only the spiritual power remains. My entire interest is in the expression of spiritual realities. I write for the theater in order to convey a spiritual attitude.

Myth does not set out to give lessons in natural science any more than in morals or sociology.

François-Bernard Mâche

Georgia, Georgia, no peace I find,
Just an old sweet song keeps Georgia on my mind.

When I'm shooting on location, you get ideas on the spot - new angles. You make not major changes but important modifications, that you can't do on a set. I do that because you have to be economical.

True music... must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans. My time is today.

George Gershwin

I almost never go to temples. I don't find the time. I'm not religious in that sense. My religion is my music. Lord Krishna is my God. Whenever I want to pray, whenever I want to meditate and concentrate, I take my flute. I can feel God. The feeling is difficult to explain, but I feel lost when I'm in it.

Hariprasad Chaurasia

All I know about method is that when I am not working I sometimes think I know something, but when I am working, it is quite clear I know nothing.