Composer Quotes

To copy the truth can be a good thing, but to invent the truth is better, much better.

You request me to tell you… if it is true that the creed of all who profess to love high and serious art is: "There is no God but Bach, and Mendelssohn is his prophet"?

I'm told that Saint-Saëns has informed a delighted public that since the war began he has composed music for the stage, melodies, an elegy and a piece for the trombone. If he'd been making shell-cases instead it might have been all the better for music.

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

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

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

My darling, I will try to guess
What do you want or wish.
I know you prefer to dream
About a Gold Fish.
But I believe that you will find
The famous and gold key.
So, you will open the door.
You saw it in your dreams.
I know: you shall overcome
All troubles in your way.
But do remember every time
About must and may.

Volodymyr Melnykov

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.

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

What a terrible revenge by the culture of the Negroes on that of the whites!

Of jazz

Ignacy Jan Paderewski

Why waste money on psychotherapy when you can listen to the B Minor Mass?

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

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

Christian Wolff

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.

It cannot be emphasized too strongly that art, as such, does not "pay," to use an American expression – at least, not in the beginning – and that the art that has to pay its own way is apt to become vitiated and cheap.

Antonín Dvořák

The falling out of faithful friends, renewing is of love.

Richard Edwardes

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

The greatest and noblest pleasure which men can have in this world is to discover new truths; and the next is to shake off old prejudices.

Frederick the Great

The habit some writers indulge in of perpetual quotation is one it behooves lovers of good literature to protest against, for it is an insidious habit which in the end must cloud the stream of thought, or at least check spontaneity. If it be true that le style c'est l homme, what is likely to happen if l homme is for ever eking out his own personality with that of some other individual?

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

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

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.

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

You conductors who are so proud of your power! When a new man faces the orchestra–from the way he walks up the steps to the podium and opens his score–before he even picks up his baton–we know whether he is the master or we.

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