American Composer Quotes

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

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

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.

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

Anything you can do, I can do better,
I can do anything better than you.

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

George Gershwin

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.

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 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.

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

A man in the theatrical business is allowed more liberties than his business brothers. His business demands it.

After a lady nicknamed the Texas Patti published some of his love letters and sued him for breach of an alleged promise to make her an opera star

Oscar Hammerstein I

It is evidently known beyond contradiction that New Orleans is the cradle of jazz and I, myself, happened to be the creator in the year 1902.

Jelly Roll Morton

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

Carrie Jacobs-Bond

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.

Walter Raymond Spalding

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

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

He died alone and forgotten and only in modern times has he come up as a genius composer and a brilliant visionary.

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.

I will cling to the old rugged cross,
And exchange it some day for a crown.