The structural thinking I use in the concert hall is unnecessary to most film projects, and most film composers make better use of the enormous range of pop and other materials and techniques required of them than I probably would, faced with the same challenge.
The record company started as an adjunct to that, to give young composers their first recorded performances; to give young musicians their first debut on a recording. These are all things that big record companies would never touch because there is no money in it!
Composers today get a TV script on Friday and have to record on Tuesday. It's just dreadful to impose on gifted talent and expect decent music under these conditions.
My advice to composers is, 'Try to reach 90, and everyone will love you.'
The Western musical canon came about not merely by accumulation, but by opposition and subversion, both to the ruling powers on whom composers depended for their livelihoods and to other musics.
Although technical discussions are interesting to composers, I suspect that the truly magical and spiritual powers of music arise from deeper levels of our psyche.
We teach young kids from 8 to 14 or 15 about their musical heritage through great songs written by American songwriters. We don't do too many modern composers, although we include songs from Billy Joel and other writers like him.
Still, American composers working in France have had a pretty hard time.
Then I started listenin' a lot to classical composers. Piano works. Just to see what they were doin'. That sort of put me in a different groove to try to blend all that in.
America can well expect to develop a goodly amount of composers for she has a goodly number of people.
Composers now just don't have the depth of inspiration for melody. Most of the lyrics of the pop songs you hear today are repetitious. They're almost nursery rhymes, as if written by children - which they are.
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.
All great composers of the past spent most of their time studying. Feeling alone won't do the job. A man also needs technique.
I loved Hendrix. I mean, really, really loved him. As if he were one of the great classical composers. And he was. That's how I saw him.
Many composers today don't know what the human throat is.
Composers, like authors, have a lot in common. Our main goal is to connect with the listener emotionally.
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'm woefully one-track-minded.
In America, at the beginning of talkies, they pulled Fred Astaire from the theaters and put him on the screen and had all of these great composers write songs for him. They call it the Great American Songbook; I call it the Fred Astaire Songbook because they were written for him.
Many, many composers have only found their way to a certain form, through familiarizing themselves with texts.
Pianists call me a composer, composers call me a pianist. The classicists think me a futurist, and the futurists call me a reactionary.
Composers are always going back to the past.
Composers love to write for symphony orchestras because the symphony is the Rolls Royce of musical instruments.
I'm really drawn to West Coast composers and I think it has a little something to do with looking across the Pacific instead of looking across the Atlantic.
Living composers writing for big band are very few and far between. There are not a lot of them, and I have a talent for doing it. I am zeroing in on what I do best.
Music is at once the product of feeling and knowledge, for it requires from its disciples, composers and performers alike, not only talent and enthusiasm, but also that knowledge and perception which are the result of protracted study and reflection.
Composers most identified with the chamber music form are Corelli, Vivaldi, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and, of course, Bach. Of course, Bach. If there is any one composer who gives us reason and emotion, it is Bach.
I would still love to do more Handel. I think Handel was a fantastic composer. I did lots of Vivaldi, but it's also important to do the music of Handel, one of the greatest composers of the 18th century.
When the Domaine Musical started up, I wasn't part of it. They were the major players in contemporary music at that time, braodcasting old and new composers' work. And I wasn't one of them.
Most theatre people and composers are like research hounds.
I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First to discourage the composer from writing any more and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven.
When you have great songs that are going to live longer than the composers, everything you can do to bring those different elements and nuances out, serve the song.
In Hollywood, the rainbow hits the ground for composers.
Let us not forget that the greatest composers were also the greatest thieves. They stole from everyone and everywhere.
I love being part of the ASCAP family of songwriters and composers.
In a fit at the bookstore one day, I bought all my favourite composers' biographies: Schubert, Massenet, Wolf. I've still not had a chance to read them; it breaks my heart. But when you travel so much, you just can't take that many books with you.
