If you think of the way a composer or say a pop arranger works - he has an idea and he writes it down, so there's one transmission loss. Then he gives the score to a group of musicians who interpret that, so there's another transmission loss. So he's involved with three information losses. Whereas what I nearly always do is work directly to the sound if it doesn't sound right. So there's a continuous loop going on.
A composer is not only an architect but also an inventor, and he should not build houses in which he cannot live.
Composers are the only people who can hear good music above bad sounds.
I always work with the same composer, his name is Ali Helnwein. I don't have a musical background.
It's hard to decide how to match words to music. It's not like it's twice the work. It's always difficult for me to explain to the composer what I'm looking for. I'm not a professional; I lack even basic knowledge about writing music
Still, American composers working in France have had a pretty hard time.
I'm trying to interpret the film through the director's head, but it all comes out through me. So, a composer is kind of like a psychic medium.
I'm not an architectural composer.
Im still getting used to being called a composer. A poseur, maybe.
There are wonderful composers and librettists out there. It's the lack of creative producers that is troubling.
I am an interpreter of music rather than a composer of it.
The modern composer builds his works on the basis of truth.
composition is notation of distortion of what composers think they've heard before. Masterpieces are marvelous misquotations.
If I take that person and play them as a record I'm becoming not only a conductor and composer of collage, but at the same time I'm looking at a whole layer of what goes into copyright law, who owns those memories, who owns the way that that sound gets remixed and transformed and above all how much fun it is to actually just mess with other people's stuff.
It doesn't necessarily mean at all that the composer plays his own works best.
I just scribbled away and eventually a C-major chord was there. I didn't ever decide I was going to be a composer. It was like being tall. It's what I was. It's what I did.
To make a film, the final big collaborator that you have is the composer.
Men have been in the forefront of music for centuries, and they have written glorious music, loved and appreciated by many. In some ways, men are still in the forefront. There is a lot of room for composers of all types of music by both men and women, nowadays.
When we look at the arts and letters in America, especially if we look at poetry, and poetry set to music, this dialogue, we have this very powerful beautiful, eclectic, diary, or narration of being in America, being American, participating in America, becoming more of America and also as an American, the American creative spirit, which is quite interesting. Our composers and poets have spent more time writing and thinking and speaking out of what it means to be a composer or poet as well as to be an American, or a composer or poet In America; both relationships.
I'm glad I won it because when I grew up the Pulitzer was the award that every composer wanted and I was like that too.