I'm really grateful. But I never had the rock star dream. I thought it would be cool to be a modern-day composer.
If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.
Composers often think in terms of music and not of an instrument itself.
For my qualifying concert, Helmut Walcha would not coach Charles-Marie Widor or any American compositions. In his defense, his forte was Germanic composers, and his forte was really a fortissimo!
Im like any other composer. If you give me five years to write a symphony, Im still going to be asking for more time two days before its due.
I dream of a collaboration that would finally be total, in which the librettist would often think as a composer and the composer as a librettist.
Human warmth is perhaps the most lacking in a composer who lives his life in a recording studio.
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.
When I am with composers, I say I am a conductor. When I am with conductors, I say I am a composer.
The modern composer builds his works on the basis of truth.
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.
I often wonder if I was destined to be a composer. I think I decided and I followed my star.
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.
Gifted women musicians and composers rarely received their due.
I sometimes think that the most plaintive ditty has brought a fuller joy and of longer duration to its composer that the conquest of Persia to the Macedonian.
Music is at once the product of feeling and knowledge.
Every composer knows the anguish and despair occasioned by forgetting ideas which one had no time to write down.
I'm trying to interpret the film through the director's head, but it all comes out through me. So, a composer is kind of like a psychic medium.
To judge a composer's work, one must consider it as a whole.