What you compose with is neither here nor there, you compose with words, or you compose with stone plants and trees, or you compose with events; the Sheriff's officer, or whatever.
In science, if you don't do it, somebody else will. Whereas in art, if Beethoven didn't compose the 'Ninth Symphony,' no one else before or after is going to compose the 'Ninth Symphony' that he composed; no one else is going to paint 'Starry Night' ...
I've got a collection of songs that I've had, I keep adding to and they're all great American composers. I wanted to showcase American composers and I've done that on a lot of my records and played things by American composers that I really respect.
I tend to listen to the classical composers: Rachmaninov, Satie.
I don't ascribe to the idea of the ivory tower composer who sits alone in a room composing his masterpieces and then comes down from Mount Sinai with the tablets. It doesn't work like that. The job of a composer is putting something down on a piece o...
He that composes himself is wiser than he that composes a book.
The great opera composers were so good at their job, that the whole genre came to be built around the concept of the composer's vision.
Just as one can compose colors, or forms, so one can compose motions.
I don't meditate before I play or compose, but I see playing and composing as meditative acts.
Since age seven, I've been composing and have never stopped composing, yet, the creative process is as elusive to me as it has ever been.
Originally, I wanted to be a composer. I always tell people, 'I think of myself as a composer.'
Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries.
Pianists call me a composer, composers call me a pianist. The classicists think me a futurist, and the futurists call me a reactionary.
Well, American composers are the best composers. At this time in the world, we are where the energy is. We are the most diverse, the most iconoclastic, the most maverick, and the most skillful.
I find respect for a mediocre British composer, as opposed to a really good American, ridiculous because they automatically respect a composer if he's from England.
It is always interesting and sometimes even important to have intimate knowledge of a composer's life, but it is not essential in order to understand the composer's works.
Normally, when people compose for film, you give them the film, and they look at it, and they compose it.
I dream of a collaboration that would finally be total, in which the librettist would often think as a composer and the composer as a librettist.
I don't compose, actually. I just record. I'm the opposite of a composer in my way of working. I'm more instinctive.
When you think of Mitch Leigh as a businessman, remember he's also a composer. And when you think of Mitch Leigh as a composer, remember he's also a businessman.
I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.
