American Composer Quotes

George Gershwin
Irving Berlin
Dave Brubeck
Thelonious Monk
Robert Mitchum
Charles Ives
Steve Reich

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.

"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."

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

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

That's a storm that's going to last until
The final wind blows... and when the wind blows,
The Cradle Will Rock.

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

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

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

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It became such a hit that it superseded anything that any band had ever had.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.

Artie Shaw
Artie Shaw
Well, this is the end of a perfect day,
Near the end of a journey, too.

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

Walk and never get tired,
Fly and never falter
I'm gonna move on up a little higher.

The night is like a lovely tune,
Beware my foolish heart!
How white the ever-constant moon,
Take care, my foolish heart!

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.

George Brecht
George Brecht
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.

Charles Mingus
Charles Mingus
I believe that most of what was said of God was in reality said of that Spirit whose body is Earth.

George W. E. Russell
George W. E. Russell
The Development, beginning in measure 132, is a striking example of how difficult it was—even for an exponent of freedom in musical expression like Schumann—to break loose from the shackles of arbitrary form.

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.

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

Lew Brown
Lew Brown
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.

If you go down in the woods today
You're sure of a big surprise
If you go down in the woods today
You'd better go in disguise
For every Bear that ever there was
Will gather there for certain because,
Today's the day the Teddy Bears have their Picnic.

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.

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
Jerry Goldsmith
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

J. J. Johnson
J. J. Johnson
We who stand on the threshold of a new century can look back on an era of unparalleled progress. Looking into the future an equally bright prospect greets our eyes; on all sides fruitful fields of research invite our labor and promise easy and rich returns. Surely this is the golden age of mathematics!