Composer Quotes

See, the night doth enfold us! See, all the world lies sleeping!

Giacomo Puccini

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

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.

The melodic curves of speech are an expression of the complete organism and of all phases of its spiritual activities. They demonstrate whether a man is stupid or intelligent, sleepy or awake, tired or alert. They tell us whether he is a child or an old man, whether it is morning or evening, light or darkness, heat or frost, and disclose whether a person is alone or in company. The art of dramatic writing is to compose a melodic curve that will, as if by magic, reveal immediately a human being in one definite phase of his existence.

Leoš Janáček

I'm goin' to Tishomingo,
Because I'm sad today.
I wish to linger,
Way down old Dixie way.
Oh my weary heart cries out in pain,
Oh how I wish that I was back again.
With a race,
In a place,
Where they make you welcome all the time.

Spencer Williams

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

Form is a theatrical event of a certain length, and the length itself may be unpredictable.

Christian Wolff

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It became such a hit that it superseded anything that any band had ever had.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

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

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.

It appears to me that they who in proof of any assertion rely simply on the weight of authority, without adducing any argument in support of it, act very absurdly. I, on the contrary, wish to be allowed freely to question and freely to answer you without any sort of adulation, as well becomes those who are in search of truth.

Vincenzo Galilei

The musical scale is a convention which circumscribes the area of potentiality and permits construction within those limits in its own particular symmetry.

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

Dmitri Shostakovich

They want me to write differently. Certainly I could, but I must not. God has chosen me from thousands and given me, of all people, this talent. It is to Him that I must give account. How then would I stand there before Almighty God, if I followed the others and not Him?

Music is everything that one listens to with the intention of listening to music.

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

Come again: sweet love doth now invite,
Thy graces that refrain,
To do me due delight,
To see, to hear, to touch, to kiss, to die,
With thee again in sweetest sympathy.

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 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.

Silent night! Holy night!
All is calm, all is bright.

Care for thy corse, but chiefly for soul's sake;
Cut off excess, sustaining food is best;
To vanquish pride but comely clothing take

When I am no more, you will hear said of my work: "After all, it is only so much..." You will detach yourself from it, perhaps... All that has no importance. I have done what I could... and so, judge, my God.

Do I love you because you're beautiful, or are you beautiful because I love you?

Richard Rodgers

A cook, when I dine, seems to me a divine being, who from the depths of his kitchen rules the human race. One considers him as a minister of heaven, because his kitchen is a temple, in which his ovens are the altar.

Marc-Antoine Madeleine Désaugiers

In poetry there are two giants, rough Homer and fine Shakespere. In music likewise we have two giants, Beethoven, the thinker, and the superthinker Berlioz.

Modest Mussorgsky