Composer Quotes

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.

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.

It is improper, to expressly pursue the Urlinie in performance and to single out its tones... for the purpose of communicating the Urlinie to the listener." Rather, "for the performer, the Urlinie provides, first of all, a sense of direction. It serves a somewhat equivalent function to that which a road map serves for a mountain climber.

Heinrich Schenker

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It became such a hit that it superseded anything that any band had ever had.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

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

Dmitri Shostakovich

I often conduct an orchestra in my sleep; my orchestras are so huge that the back desks of the violas vanish into the horizon. And everything is so wonderful.

My true function within a society which embraces all of us is to continue an age-old tradition. This tradition is to create images from the depths of the imagination and to give them form, whether visual, intellectual or musical.

Michael Tippett

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

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

Of jazz

Ignacy Jan Paderewski

Let us, at any rate, give heed to suffer joyfully the crosses that God sends us, because they all, if we are saved, will become for us eternal joys. When infirmities, pains, or any adversities afflict us, let us lift up our eyes to heaven and say, "One day all these pains will have an end, and after them I hope to enjoy God forever."

Alphonsus Maria de' Liguori

Verbal communication about music is impossible except among musicians.

Music is made up of a large number of individual sounds, and is either a single melody or a part-song.

Johannes Tinctoris

The number of interviews I've ever given could be counted on the fingers of my hands.

What good it does one to have a hearty, uncontrollable fit of laughter.

Charlotte Alington Barnard

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.

Life is just a bowl of cherries,
Don't take it serious; it's too mysterious.

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?

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

Christian Wolff

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

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.

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

Poetry and painting have arrived to their perfection in our own country; music is yet but in its nonage [immaturity], a forward Child, which gives hope of what it may be hereafter in England, when the masters of it shall find more Encouragement.

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

Carrie Jacobs-Bond

There are no compensations to weigh against advancing years – no, not one.