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.
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.
I really liked doing a number of the projects and directors, and etc., etc., I knew about half-way through that I would never be doing that again. It's just not me. I really am happy as a part-time film composer, not a full-time film composer.
When you're making video, you're giving structure to time, which is what a composer does.
Intelligent analysis of the composer's intention and strict adherence to it automatically ensures sincerity.
I am the pianist of the duo, although Aleksey does pretty good... you know we've written more and more stuff where he has to play the piano. But you know, to be very honest, I actually went into music because I wanted to be a composer and a conductor. And piano was just one of the ways to get into that.
The more dollars the studio producers put in, the less freedom we have. If the budget hits $100m, they get scared - they'll take the existing score of a successful movie and expect composers to copy it, like wallpaper. The biggest challenge for any composer in Hollywood is to be as creative as possible within those boundaries.
I've had those people very interested in my writing. Since I think of myself as a composer, I feel really good. I've had lots of guys call me up. I've gotten two or three commissions to write things. I've written lots of movie scores.
I was meant to be a composer and will be I'm sure. Don't ask me to try to forget this unpleasant thing and go play football - please.
The real architecture happens within the works themselves, and that was done by the composer. That's where the real skill is. In putting together a program, you're more a curator, but that's important as well. And then the interpreting of it is where our big job is.
I feel very free and very happy to be a composer.
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.
I am under no illusion that I will ever be the greatest opera composer in the world, with Wagner and Verdi and Strauss before me. I think my work could fit very nicely into musicals, though.
Because I have sixty years of being a professional composer, conductor, musician, whatever, and you develop a lot of friendships and you get involved with a lot of sort of long-term commitments and obligations.
I'm a composer, and therefore I know when I've written a good tune. When you've written a good song is when you know that the lyric is completely coalesced with the song.
Sammy Davis, Andy Williams, Tony Bennett... their records sell in the millions; when I do it, it just trickles. But for the composer and lyricist, there's a tidy bit to be made that way, too, so I don't really mind.
Today each composer is not only involved in aesthetics, but he's actually trying to create his own language.
Soon, I knew that I would become a chemist, rather than a composer.
Before I start, I create a set list that I listen to while I'm writing. For 'Intimate Apparel,' I loaded Erik Satie, Scott Joplin, klezmer music, and the American jazz performer and composer Reginald Robinson.
Bach's music is really some of the greatest. I think, in some ways, Bach is the most profound composer of all.
I think it's good for the composer to teach because you always have new students and you have to begin at the beginning and make things clear.
I don't think a guy that really has no understanding about people, or has no interest in understanding people would make a good film composer.
For a composer of concert music, 40 is actually very young. But for a rock musician, 40 is almost past due, where you think of rock music as really part of more youth-oriented culture.
Every song has a composer, every book has an author, every car has a maker, every painting has a painter, and every building has a builder. So it isn't irrational to take this simple logic a little further and say that nature must have had a Maker. It would be irrational to believe that it made itself.
The further the music develops, the more complex the apparatus used by the composer to express his thoughts becomes.
If a composer has a nice wife and some nice children, how can he let the children starve on his dissonances?
The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.
I continued to study Math and Physics on my own, but one and a half years later I realized that I did want to be a composer, and after that I never changed my mind.
Yes, Carl Vine stuck around. He's now number one composer for choreography.
The real composer thinks about his work the whole time; he is not always conscious of this, but he is aware of it later when he suddenly knows what he will do.
When my opera Plump Jack was performed in 1989, my first piano teacher sent me something that I'd composed when I was four. I remember I played it, and it still sounded like me. I'm the same composer I was then.
I'm not an intellectual composer.
I'm not a frustrated concert composer, and the concert pieces I've done have been a small part of my work. What I've sought there is instruction, variation from the demands of film and relief from its restrictions.
Americans can pretty much sing anything, whereas foreign singers are often limited in style, language, even composer.
Originally, I wanted to be a composer. I always tell people, 'I think of myself as a composer.'
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.
