American Composer Quotes

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!

James Lord Pierpont

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

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.

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

George Gershwin

You have to eat oatmeal or you'll dry up. Anybody knows that.

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

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.

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.

John Walter Bratton

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

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

If of these United States I was the President,
No man that owed another should ever pay a cent;
And he who dunn'd another should be banished far away,
And attention to the pretty girls is all a man should pay.

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

When you are clear about what you want to learn, you will find your teacher. The teacher is already there. The two of you will meet because you are looking for each other.

Dare to be a Daniel,
Dare to stand alone,
Dare to have a purpose firm!
Dare to make it known!

When the night has come
And the land is dark
And the moon is the only light we'll see
No I won't be afraid, no I won't be afraid
Just as long as you stand, stand by me.

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.

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.

For the man of talent affects to call his transgressions of the laws of sense trivial and to count them nothing considerd with his devotion to his art.

Verbal communication about music is impossible except among musicians.

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

W. Herbert Brewster

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.

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

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

Vladimir Horowitz

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

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.