I think a lot of composers get into trouble just making up a plot and expecting an audience to follow that.
I was always drawn to Broadway musicals, and obviously composers like Gershwin, Rodgers, Berlin and Porter were writing music that I found wildly impressive.
I regrettably wasted time at university by being overwhelmed and intimidated by the talent of other composers. I felt stuck and didn't know what I was doing there. I enjoyed my experience, but I didn't grab it in the way I would now.
My musical knowledge is so bad it's embarrassing. When composers discuss music with someone as primitive as myself, they have to talk about it in terms of senses and emotion, rather than keys and tempo.
What inspires me is not so much the music as the opportunity to interact with composers. I think that has driven everything I've done.
Well, the very best operas are the ones written by the very best composers.
I got my first break in 'Bhootnath,' solely on my credit, and went on to sing for around 20 films for all the leading music composers.
It's amazing how fast generations lose sight of other generations. One of the first things the young composers who come to work with me say is that they want to write music people will like, instead of gaining their credentials by being rejected by the audience.
Film composers are the most prolific music makers on this planet, and most of us are, like, losing our minds if we're doing five or more movies in a year.
The number of e-mails and letters that I get from choreographers, from sculptors, from composers who are being inspired by science is huge.
The Russian composers, especially, tricked the symphony orchestra into the kind of dynamic, rhythmic thing.
Good writers are monotonous, like good composers. They keep trying to perfect the one problem they were born to understand.
Music is a continuum and the modern and avant-garde composers of today will be part of the standard repertoire 30 years from now.
My favorite instrument is the snare drum. In Scotland, the snare drum is very prominent in Highland bands. The Scottish style of playing is in my blood. It's a very powerful instrument, but it can also be soothing, like velvet. It's a real challenge for composers.
Composers are not all good conductors.
We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.
I have tremendous respect for film composers.
Composers and lyricists are not responsible for storyline and casting. One can imagine actors shouldering this responsibility, since they charge for half the film. But producers never ask actors to share the losses. Instead, they train their guns on composers and lyricists.
I live in a country where music has very little success, though, exclusive of those who have forsaken us, we have still admirable professors and, more particularly, composers of great solidity, knowledge, and taste.
I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself, in a sense, in the mid 1960s really, when I first heard composers like Terry Riley, and when I first started playing with tape recorders.
I would really love to do the score for movies. Pick the music and work with composers. I don't know if I'd be any good at it, but I love music.
I began like all composers, writing for small groups. Chamber groups.
I look at composers and conductors, anybody involved in music or writing or art in general; they got more done as they got older. If I can, I'll be one of those people because what I do is my passion.
I still the love classic period, but also the baroque period, and even 17th-Century music such as the music of Monteverdi. He's one of the greatest opera composers. He was the one who really started the opera.
I took classical piano for a couple of years, but I sort of lost interest - I couldn't read a note today if I tried. I still enjoy that stuff, and I think I naturally gravitate towards the classical licks; in fact, I know that I do. I gravitate towards the classical licks that I heard by famous old composers.
Before I was 5, I did have a lot of time on my hands. I had no job and really no career, and I spent an awful lot of time listening to records. It was more the classical ones, really - Prokofiev, and I think there was some Mozart in there, and more impressionistic composers like Delius.
Copland was one of the first American composers to forge a truly modern style of American classical music while also making use of American popular music - including jazz.
A whole generation of veteran composers has never taken a stand or provided an example and has produced in the music academies generations of docile workers for the music industry. What can you expect from downtrodden workers who see music as a type of profession, like stenography, and not an act of creation that by its nature is subversive?
Few of us boggle - though we should - at the fact that Louis Armstrong sang and played trumpet with similar panache, or that Leonard Bernstein and Benjamin Britten were equally adept as composers, conductors and pianists.
Magicians are typically introverted; they don't tend to work with others, but I work with software programmers, composers, designers, so it's a very diverse group and the result is always more interesting than something I could have done by myself.
In chess, computers show that what we call 'strategy' is reducible to tactics, ultimately. It only looks creative to us. They are still just glorified cash registers. This should make us feel uncomfortable, whether or not we think computers will ever be good composers of music or artistic painters.
Composers need words, but they do not necessarily need poetry. The Russian composer, Aleksandr Mossolov, who chose texts from newspaper small ads, had a good point to make. With revolutionary music, any text can be set to work.
If we want to share the message of the composers, to give good things back to humanity, we have to dig deep while we can.
The team at ASCAP is a genuine family, and I am proud to be part of an organization that is home to so many legendary songwriters and composers.
I came across a lot of young composers who have got passion but lack experience. I want to help them out.
Compared with other Indian film composers, I only write about six movies a year. Others write up to 60.
