Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Every time I sit for a song, I feel I am finished. It's like a beggar sitting waiting for God to fill your bowl with the right thought. In every song, I ask help from Him. Everybody around is so good, so to create music that will connect with so many people is not humanly possible without inspiration.
For my first movie, I think my first cut was like three hours, because when you first direct a movie, you want to keep everything. But I'm not one of those directors who falls in love with the stuff they've done. Already when I'm doing my first cut, I'm willing to cut out everything that is necessary.
Writing can flow out when I'm feeling something strongly, whether that's joy, pain, fear, desire or anything else. The challenge is actually later, in the second or third or 100th draft of the music, when it can be so easy to cover up the original sentiments by making the music more ornate or cloaked.
I was in bands as a singer-guitarist-songwriter until 1980-81. So, there's a bunch of stuff. A lot of the stuff is hard to come by-stuff by the Special Interest Group and the Zobo Funn Band. The Zobo Funn Band was a big Northeast cult band. We had about a billion skirmishes with the big rock industry.
That childhood passion and involvement and being really submerged in something, that's the kind of state I'm looking for all the time - and preserving that sense of magical possibility and wonder that children have. I think, for artists, if you can stay connected to that, then you are in a good place.
Discipline is not just about work, but about diet and about exercise and on a deeper level, about concentrating and making sure that my brain is staying in good places and the neurons are firing in positive ways as opposed to getting into anxiety, panic-attack states of mind. When I'm crazy. You know?
If, while at the piano, you attempt to form little melodies, that is very well; but if they come into your mind of themselves, when you are not practising, you may be still more pleased; for the internal organ of music is then roused in you. The fingers must do what the head desires; not the contrary.
It's very important for any artist, in any field, to take their own temperature and check out their own energy, and see what it is they ought to be doing to keep the energy up. Because if your energy is not up, you're going to come up with some really dreary piece of work that no one's going to enjoy.
Sentient compassion is a must; it has to be developed in order to alleviate cruelty and thoughtless acts. That won't happen if you develop a sense of compassion. You'll have that connectedness, that knowing that the same life that's in you is in every other being, so you're not going to mishandle life.
The ukulele totally fits that whole hipster community or whatever you want to call it, but then at the same time it works great in nursing homes where senior citizens get together and play, and then as the traditional Hawaiian instrument with people doing the Hula and strumming the ukulele and singing.
I love artists making cool music, regardless of the style.So, if a country artist making really cool music came along and asked me to work with them, I just might say yes, even though I'm not super-knowledgeable about country, like I am about hip-hop. I might do that because the idea is so interesting.
I think I learned more about writing scores for Broadway by making mix tapes in the '90s than I did in college. You're learning about rise and fall and energy and tempo shifts. You're showing off your taste and your references. You're trying to be witty by - through placement of music you didn't write.
I made a movie when I was 15 years old with all my friends. This is when IMDb was a little more lax with its proceedings, so it's listed as one of my projects. I was 15 years old; it's a terrible movie. I wrote 50 percent of it because I wanted to kiss this one girl, and I wrote a kissing scene for it.
I cannot write in verse, for I am no poet. I cannot arrange the parts of speech with such art as to produce effects of light and shade, for I am no painter. Even by signs and gestures I cannot express my thoughts and feelings, for I am no dancer. But I can do so by means of sounds, for I am a musician.
Marylata [ Elton] introduced me to Hans Zimmer. Hans tapped me [to] work on songs for DreamWorks' animated features. I arranged Elton John's opening main title for The Road to El Dorado, I played guitars on Shrek for Harry Gregson-Williams and John Powell, I co-produced "I Can See Clearly Now" for Antz.
I started the label Tzadik to support an entire community of musicians, not just Jewish musicians. But the radical Jewish culture movement was begun in a lot of ways because I wanted to take the idea that Jewish music equals 'klezmer' and expand it to, 'Well, Jewish music could be a lot more than that.'
Someone once said that the two most important things in developing taste were sensitivity and intelligence. I don't think this is so; I'd rather call them curiosity and courage. Curiosity to look for the new and the hidden; courage to develop your own tastes regardless of what others might say or think.
People usually complain that music is so ambiguous, and what they are supposed to think when they hear it is so unclear, while words are understood by everyone. But for me it is exactly the opposite...what the music I love expresses to me are thoughts not to indefinite for words, but rather too definite.
My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit.
I'm very interested in vertical space.I want the players to listen to their sound in such a way that they hear the complete sound they make before they make another one. So that means that they hear the tail of the sound. Because of the reverberation, there's always more to the sound than just the sound.
Some people feel like you need to have a very specialized understanding of music to have the authority to talk about it. They are such good directors that it's perfectly possible to have conceptual and directorial and storytelling conversations about music without needing to know all the technical pieces.
I don't think they understand it's as important as math and science. It rounds you out as a person. I think it gives you a love of certain things. You don't have to become the next great composer. It's just nice to have heard certain things or to have seen certain things. It's part of being a human being.
To be honest, we have no control over what's going on with a movie, much less what people are going to think of it. Your whole life is wound up in it but you don't have control and you have to get used to being on that turbulent plane without trying to fly it. The less you think about all that the better.
The artist is always searching for the meaning of life, his own and that of mankind, searching for truth. A system of uncertainty has entered our daily life. The pressures of mechanization and uniformity to which it is subject call for protest and the artist has only one means of expressing this, by music.
I remember being handed a score composed by Mozart at the age of eleven. What could I say? I felt like de Kooning, who was asked to comment on a certain abstract painting, and answered in the negative. He was then told it was the work of a celebrated monkey. 'That's different. For a monkey, it's terrific'.
I never really sounded like Bird, but that was my mission. I didn't care if people said that I copied him; I loved Bird's playing so much. But Mingus was the one that really pushed me away from the idea and forced me into thinking about having an individual sound and concept. That's what I got from Mingus.
In these dangerous times, where it seems the world is ripping apart at the seams, we can all learn how to survive from those who stare death squarely in the face every day, and we should reach out to each other and bond as a community, rather than hide from the terrors of life at the end of the millennium.
I'm suspicious of the idea of categories in music and this idea of things being in boxes. To me, that seems unnatural. I write the music that somebody with my biography would write, and the thing that's always driven me is an enthusiasm for the material. I sort of follow the notes to where they want to go.
For me, the most important thing is the element of chance that is built into a live performance. The very great drawback of recorded sound is the fact that it is always the same. No matter how wonderful a recording is, I know that I couldn't live with it--even of my own music--with the same nuances forever.
Unity is surely the indispensable thing if meaning is to exist. Unity, to be very general, is the establishment of the utmost relatedness between all component parts... the aim is to make as clear as possible the relationships between the parts of the unity; in short, to show how one thing leads to another.
De Palma is delicious! He respects music; he respects composers. For 'The Untouchables,' everything I proposed to him was fine, but then he wanted a piece that I didn't like at all, and of course we didn't have an agreement on that. It was something I didn't want to write - a triumphal piece for the police.
One needs only to study a certain positioning of the hand in relation to the keys to obtain with ease the most beautiful sounds, to know how to play long notes and short notes and to achieve certain unlimited dexterity. A well formed technique, it seems to me, can control and vary a beautiful sound quality.
Jumping twenty or so years later, Ann Ciccolella, artistic director of Austin Shakespeare, approached me with the idea of staging Anthem. She had heard my film score to Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life. And she said, I want to do Anthem as an oratorio. Well, I figured what she meant was a straight play with music.
Johnny Depp's performance is quite remarkable. Sweeney's desire for revenge and the simmering anger and hurt that he feels carry the story forward, and Johnny finds the most remarkable variety within that narrow set of emotions. The intensity is at a boil all the time and he never drops it. It's real anger.
The Beatles realized that what they were making in the studio could never be performed. And they had already given up on performing because there were too many screaming fans and they were playing in larger and larger venues so they couldn't even hear what they were playing, it just wasn't any fun any more.
John [Coltrane] was like a visitor to this planet. He came in peace and he left in peace; but during his time here, he kept trying to reach new levels of awareness, of peace, of spirituality. That's why I regard the music he played as spiritual music -- John's way of getting closer and closer to the Creator.
I remember, once I was going through Nice airport with Roger Moore, and these kids came up and asked for our autographs. Afterwards, Roger said, 'It must be very strange for you. I'm an actor, and signing autographs is part of what I do. But you're a public figure who people don't really know.' He was right.
There is more to creative mastership than the surface of satisfaction and political certainty. The music of Joe Fonda is part of a living tradition of belief and dedication. Future historians will be surprised at the breadth of Mr. Fonda's offerings. This is a real virtuoso and composer of the highest order.
No one can bar me from joyfully proceeding on what the great masters have left us; after all, to rediscover everything again, should be understood to be unfounded. But one should however proceed on merit, and not simply repeat wat was. All genius, sincere, deserves his place, even though maybe later in life.
With the violin, for example, one understands culturally that the sound comes from the instrument that can be seen. With electronic music, it is not the same at all. That's why it seemed so important to me, from the beginning of my career, to invent a grammar, a visual vocabulary adapted to electronic music.
I don't have synesthesia, but I think when music is really intense, it's almost like it's more than just hearing. If you're at a gig, and there's just something amazing going on, it's not really just hearing: it's more of a total body sense, isn't it? You get transported, and all your senses kind of join up.
I think that animals aren't less intelligent than humans, they're just of a different intelligence. We have five million smell-sensitive cells in our nose, they have two hundred and fifty million - they can smell emotion. They can smell different types of emotion, they just have another type of intelligence.
I've always wanted to get as far as possible from the place where I was born. Far both geographically and spiritually. To leave it behind ... I feel that life is very short and the world is there to see and one should know as much about it as possible. One belongs to the whole world, not just one part of it.
I think from age 13, 14, 15, I thought, yes, this rich studio produced music is the future, but it can't be the future to go run away into the recording studio. How can we take that kind of complexity and richness and make it possible for people to touch it and play it live. That's what hyperinstruments are.
The wonders of the music of the future will be of a higher & wider scale and will introduce many sounds that the human ear is now incapable of hearing. Among these new sounds will be the glorious music of angelic chorales. As men hear these they will cease to consider Angels as figments of their imagination.
Here's the truth. The proposed top rate of income tax is not 50 per cent. It is 50 per cent plus 1.5 per cent national insurance paid by employees plus 13.3 per cent paid by employers. That's not 50 per cent. Two years from now, Britain will have the highest tax rate on earned income of any developed country.
Making words rhyme for a living is one of the great joys of my life... That's a superpower I've been very conscious of developing. I started at the same level as everybody else, and then I just listened to more music and talked to myself until it was an actual superpower I could pull out on special occasions.
That's the trouble with awards for a body of work. They always come at both a good time and a wrong time. Good because they tell you what you've been doing was worth the doing and wrong because they ought to come when you're young and excited and hungry for assurance that what you're doing is worth the doing.
We didn't want to do that. It would have been a beautiful moment in the movie but it would have brought the movie down. So Danny's vision was perfect I think when he wanted it to be driven at the same time having this new emotion about this boy coming as a hallucination or like a déjà vu and as the future kid.
It is that kind of space, that little space of longing, whether it is in something like romantic love, or whether it's in something like divine love. You know, that kind of search for something that's not quite in your grasp. It's a very powerful place to explore as an artist, because it's not necessarily sad.