20th-century Composer Quotes

If you're in jazz and more than ten people like you, you're labelled commercial.

Someone once said that the two most important things in developing taste were sensitivity and intelligence. I don't think this is so; I'd rather call them curiosity and courage. Curiosity to look for the new and the hidden; courage to develop your own tastes regardless of what others might say or think.

R. Murray Schafer

Autumn in New York Is often mingled with pain. Dreamers with empty hands May sigh for exotic lands; It's Autumn in New York, It's good to live it again.

Nowadays, all students have access to and indeed most own computers and are comfortable with the software used to compose music. There are probably too many musical options for them now and the trick is to limit the number of musical ideas so as to develop structure and continuity in their work.

The hotel wasn't that empty, however. Soon an old man walked unsteadily out of the nearby lounge and plopped himself into a big easy chair beside the piano. There, he slowly sipped his wine and watched me play. I felt distracted and uneasy, trapped on the bench where at any moment he might request one of his favourite tunes, one I most likely did not know how to play. [...] He said me: Who will play your music if you don't do it yourself?

A need to concentrate on each sound, so that every blade of grass would be as important as a flower.

My attitude to writing is.. it's like when you do wallpapering, you know, you remember where all the little bits are that don't meet, you think: "Oh my God that's horrible..." And then your friends come and say: "Who did this wallpapering? It's terrific!"

Harrison Birtwistle

Resist me—
Make me strong.
For since I cannot be what you will
I shall always be that much more so
What I will.

On "Begin the Beguine":

It became such a hit that it superseded anything that any band had ever had. It was the first time that a so-called swing band played something melodic and still gave it a beat.

Unlike American film score composers, Japanese film score composers are given only three or four days in which to write the music for a movie. Because of this, I have almost always been very frustrated while writing a score. I therefore can't select any of my scores as favorites.

I dare suggest that the composer would do himself and his music an immediate and eventual service by total, resolute and voluntary withdrawal from this public world to one of private performance and electronic media.

Have another little piece of my heart now baby, You know you got it if it makes you feel good.

With a wracking head and literally my whole body shaking as with ague I write this and tell you I have just this afternoon early finished Clavicembalisticum... The closing 4 pages are so cataclysmic and catastrophic as anything I've ever done — the harmony bites like nitric acid — the counterpoint grinds like the mills of God...

Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji

There were birds in the sky, but I never saw them winging, No I never saw them at all, Until there was you.

Meredith Willson

We've got to have
We plot to have
For it's so dreary not to have
That certain thing called the Boy Friend.

Humanity seems doomed to do more evil than good. The greatest ideal on earth is human love.

Władysław Szpilman

You read reviews by top reviewers of films that not only had remarkably interesting scores, but films whose effectiveness was absolutely enhanced, and frequently created by the music, yet the reviewers seem unaware that their emotions and their nervous reactions to the films have been affected by the scoring. This is a serious flaw. Any film reviewer owes it to himself, and the public, to take every element of the film into account

Jerry Goldsmith

They were summoned from the hillside,
They were called in from the glen,
And the country found them ready
At the rallying call for men
Let no tears add to their hardships

Jazz is about the only form of art existing today in which there is this freedom of the individual without the loss of group contact.

I discovered that the most interesting music of all was made by simply lining the loops in unison, and letting them slowly shift out of phase with each other...

The recollection of how, when and where it all happened became vague as the lingering strains hung in the rafters of the studio. I wanted to shout back at it, Maybe I didn't write you, but I found you.

Hoagy Carmichael

I hope it is clear... that the ways in which pitches represent pitch classes, and the ways pitch classes abstract pitch, must be examined in order to describe any kind of musical sense or progression, and that if one steps back into abstracted considerations derived without respect to such concerns, an understanding of the qualities of musical uniqueness will continue to be suppressed in favor of generalizations, which at best evoke a vague sense of what a piece may be doing, perhaps in common with some other pieces, but not what one piece is doing, all by itself.

When I looked at my own self and my own depression, it was funny. It was very sad, but it was also very funny.

Elizabeth Swados

The piano is the easiest instrument to play in the beginning, and the hardest to master in the end.

Vladimir Horowitz

The relationship of feminism to my work and the evolution of the form of my music are in violent flux.