Composer Quotes

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.

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"?

The symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything.

To Sibelius

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

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

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

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.

Every man and woman alive is gifted by God in some special way. People who have a self-image of worth are going to see value in what they do. This is the attitude that motivates them to be and to do their best. It's a drive that comes from within people.

I don't think that it is good for the world of music to have everything come out of the same mold. God didn't place only roses on earth, or only lilies or only violets. He put flowers of many sorts and many colors here, the beauty of each enhancing that of the others.

William Grant Still

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

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

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

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

Of jazz

Ignacy Jan Paderewski

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

If nobody ever offers an opinion or takes the slightest interest in one's production, one loses not only all pleasure in them, but all power of judging their value.

Fanny Mendelssohn

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

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

The distance in form, intention, mood and expression between Schubert's songs for voice and piano and those of, say, Adele is remarkably small.

Whether I was in my body or out of my body I know not. God knows it!

George Frideric Handel

Artists live with God – but give their little finger to Satan. I sleep with the angels and dream of the devil.

Heitor Villa-Lobos

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