Every composer understands and uses the system of notation differently, and that's what makes you appreciate the trouble they go through in doing so.
I think there's a time as a writer when you want to see the best things in life, and you go out wherever you go with your dreams as a writer or a composer.
Pianists call me a composer, composers call me a pianist. The classicists think me a futurist, and the futurists call me a reactionary.
I'm not an intellectual composer.
Music was not invented by the composer, but found.
Stravinsky the composer I worship. Stravinsky the thinker I despise.
My dream was always to be a composer, but fashion came very easily.
If I weren't a director, I would want to be a film composer.
When I write, I fall into the zone many writers, painters, musicians, athletes, and craftsmen of all sorts seem to share: In doing something I enjoy and am expert at, deliberate thought falls aside and it is all just THERE. I think of the next word no more than the composer thinks of the next note.
I was in the army, and I had given up the thought of being a composer.
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.
As a composer I could never find use for over 4 or 5 notes in any musical number, and as a playwright most of my plays have two acts because i couldn't think of an idea for the third act.
An artist makes something to be physically experienced by another person. It's a raw, freely chosen, interpersonal relationship between the maker and the viewer, so it's close to what a musical composer does, or a poet or a dancer. It is coming out of one's inner being.
A review of his work: His music soon spread throughout Europe, and he was invited to America were he performed the Piano Concerto. He would have wished that he would be remembered as an opera composer, but it was to be his orchestral extravaganzas, mainly the trilogy of Roman pictures that has made his name famous.
I've always been a composer dependent on texts.
I think that one of the things that influences me most as a composer is to what extent I can deconstruct and reconstruct the material that I'm working with.
What do you think happens to a composer who is sincere and loves to write and has to wait thirty years to have someone play a piece of his music?
Do you know that my very first experience as a composer was a 'Concerto for Accordion?
A great ancient poet was blind. A great classical composer was deaf. Many of us are dumb. What have we to show for it?
I think that if I were required to spend the rest of my life on a desert island, and to listen to or play the music of any one composer during all that time, that composer would almost certainly be Bach.