Composer Quotes

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

Pardon me boy is that the Chattanooga Choo-choo,
Track twenty nine,
Boy you can gimme a shine.
I can afford to board a Chattanooga Choo-choo,
I've got my fare and just a trifle to spare.
You leave the Pennsylvania station 'bout a quarter to four,
Read a magazine and then you're in Baltimore,
Dinner in the diner nothing could be finer
Than to have your ham'n eggs in Carolina.

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It became such a hit that it superseded anything that any band had ever had.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

With a wracking head and literally my whole body shaking as with ague I write this and tell you I have just this afternoon early finished Clavicembalisticum... The closing 4 pages are so cataclysmic and catastrophic as anything I've ever done — the harmony bites like nitric acid — the counterpoint grinds like the mills of God...

Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji

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

Charlotte Alington Barnard

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

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.

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.

I was not influenced by composers as much as by natural objects and physical phenomena. As a child, I was tremendously impressed by the qualities and character of the granite I found in Burgundy, where I often visited my grandfather... So I was always in touch with things of stone and with this kind of pure structural architecture — without frills or unnecessary decoration. All of this became an integral part of my thinking at a very early stage.

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.

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.

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

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.

I almost never go to temples. I don't find the time. I'm not religious in that sense. My religion is my music. Lord Krishna is my God. Whenever I want to pray, whenever I want to meditate and concentrate, I take my flute. I can feel God. The feeling is difficult to explain, but I feel lost when I'm in it.

Hariprasad Chaurasia

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

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

Of jazz

Ignacy Jan Paderewski

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