John Barry was the first film composer I was aware of. As a teenager I owned several of his Bond soundtracks.
Since Mozart's day composers have learned the art of making music throatily and palpitatingly sexual.
You can't have Bach, Mozart and Beethoven as your favorite composers. They simply define what music is!
It’s really strange, but they speak to me — the notes and the chords. So when I hear other people’s music, I can feel the composer. Whoever created that, I can see in their soul.
The composer Stravinsky had written a new piece with a difficult violin passage. After it had been in rehearsal for several weeks, the solo violinist came to Stravinsky and said he was sorry, he had tried his best, the passage was too difficult, no violinist could play it. Stravinsky said, 'I understand that. What I am after is the sound of someone trying to play it. '
With television you are producing hours and hours of music and for film it is a shorter experience for both the audience and for you as a composer.
Stravinsky the composer I worship. Stravinsky the thinker I despise.
Criticism will survive even if no one's paying for it. Obviously it's better if people are paying for it. But the fact that artists weren't able to make a living from their work hasn't detracted from the quality of that work. Charles Ives was the second greatest composer in American history and he worked in insurance his whole life.
I've always been a composer dependent on texts.
Horror allows you to do things as a composer than you're able to do in no other style of movie. The music has to be aggressive. You can't tiptoe around. It has to be incredibly focused dramatically - no time for second thoughts. It needs to generate a kneejerk reaction.
I am writing something which I find satisfying and which I am prepared to put my name to as a composer.
It's a myth that you need to understand all the ins and outs of music. The ideal scenario is you have a conceptual, directorial conversation about what you're trying to achieve in a theme and then trust your composer to go ahead and do that.
In Hollywood, the rainbow hits the ground for composers.
A review of his work: His music soon spread throughout Europe, and he was invited to America were he performed the Piano Concerto. He would have wished that he would be remembered as an opera composer, but it was to be his orchestral extravaganzas, mainly the trilogy of Roman pictures that has made his name famous.
I'm less interested in uniqueness than in goodness. I see so many concerts where the program notes are more interesting than the music. I remember talking to one composer who went through the most complicated mathematical algorithm to generate some material from scratch. It took weeks and weeks, and he came up with a C major chord. For me, honesty is more interesting than originality.
I don't think they understand it's as important as math and science. It rounds you out as a person. I think it gives you a love of certain things. You don't have to become the next great composer. It's just nice to have heard certain things or to have seen certain things. It's part of being a human being.
Nobody can give a good performance unless the authors and composers have written a good part, a fact which is often overlooked.
The composers could no longer direct all performances in person, and so the responsibility of interpreting their works in the spirit in which they had been conceived was placed upon conductors.
I like a composer called Henry Purcell, and I love to listen to Neil Young.
A good composer is slowly discovered and a bad composer is slowly found out.