Zitat des Tages über Komponisten / Composers:
A large part of my work has been collaborating with composers; I think we've commissioned about 140 pieces now, a lot of them percussion concertos.
Perhaps two million years ago the creatures of a planet in some remote galaxy faced a musical crisis similar to that which we earthly composers face today.
All composers who came after were influenced by Beethoven, even during his lifetime, both by his personality and by his music. He was a father figure for generations.
The first year I started in San Francisco, there was an American work on every program and there's been a lot of music by living composers and gradually that was part of the process of getting the audience really to trust me.
I was not influenced by composers as much as by natural objects and physical phenomena.
I've got a collection of songs that I've had, I keep adding to and they're all great American composers. I wanted to showcase American composers and I've done that on a lot of my records and played things by American composers that I really respect.
I would advise my young colleagues, the composers of symphonies, to drop in sometimes at the kindergarten, too. It is there that it is decided whether there will be anybody to understand their works in twenty years' time.
There's still a lot I need to do as a player, as a musician, as a sound creator. I have commissioned 170 pieces: that's still not enough, there are still lots and lots of composers I would like to approach. When I see a composer and I see a performer, I think to combine those forces.
I am not one of the great composers. All the great have produced enormously. There is everything in their work - the best and the worst, but there is always quantity. But I have written relatively little.
I think the thing's that perhaps sad really is that younger people haven't come in and I think it must have been absolutely fantastic to have worked in the 50's when you had all of the great Broadway composers and when West Side Story didn't win the Tony Award.
Dietz and Schwartz have sort of fallen by the wayside a little bit, and they are up there with Rodgers and Hart and Irving Berlin and Cole Porter. They are the finest of the revue composers - their stuff is so good and so strong.
So many of the sounds that contemporary composers were trying to create were to be found in the traditional musics of the world. That was encouraging but also little daunting to think that you had to work so hard to be new and yet it was old.
Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules... Mathematicians are more like classical composers.
Other composers have taken this particular technique much further than I in the meantime, with the result that the Law of Diminishing Returns has begun to apply.
Nobody can give a good performance unless the authors and composers have written a good part, a fact which is often overlooked.
I've heard though that there is a younger generation of tonal French composers who are reacting with vigour.
A hundred years ago, of course, the question that the German Composers' Co-operative asked itself sounded a lot more fundamental: How do you create a fair share for those who ensure that works can actually be performed at all?
A characteristic of older folksongs, in most cases, is that we don't know their composers or authors. Older folksongs were written often with no commercial purpose in mind. They were passed down by word of mouth, from generation to generation.
I feel that I belong to the 19th century. Some composers' music is very topical. It almost says, 'This is about what I read in newspapers yesterday.' Not mine.
When I began, the guitar was en-closed in a vicious circle. There were no composers writing for the guitar, be-cause there were no virtuoso guitarists.
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 don't use composers. I research music the way I research the photographs or the facts in my scripts.
Composers are the only people who can hear good music above bad sounds.
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.
You know creators, composers, need a palette for life, a color for life.
There are two classes of women in Soviet Russia. There is the professional class, which has taken the place of the nobility and includes government officials, artists, doctors, composers and writers as well as former members of the old nobility whose sympathy is with the Soviets, and also the peasant class.
Film music has a great history of composers and performers.
Gifted women musicians and composers rarely received their due.
Composers in the old days used to keep strictly to the base of the theme, as their real subject. Beethoven varies the melody, harmony and rhythms so beautifully.
Two pieces of advice for young composers: Go away during technical rehearsals. And do not have a back operation.
All of these people kept on being professional musicians and composers in the strictest sense.
I am certain that most composers today would consider today's music to be rich, not to say confusing, in its enormous diversity of styles, technical procedures, and systems of esthetics.
Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries.
I am getting to work with some good musicians, artistes, and composers.
I think that live shows are more important for singers than composers, because composers still get a lot of recognition as compared to a singer.
Composers shouldn't think too much - it interferes with their plagiarism.
