Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The more I compose, the more I know that I don't know it all. I think it's a good way to start. If you think you know it all, the work becomes a repetition of what you've already done.
I thank the Creator of the universe to have discovered the discipline of music was the greatest gift that I could have been given, the possibility to be a student working in the world.
Market value is irrelevant to intrinsic value. ... Unqualified judgment can at most claim to decide the market-value - a value that can be in inverse proportion to the intrinsic value.
For a composer of concert music, 40 is actually very young. But for a rock musician, 40 is almost past due, where you think of rock music as really part of more youth-oriented culture.
You just plant a few seeds, cultivate the shoots, and watch your career grow and branch out. It takes time and dedication. There are no overnight success stories in the music business!
Someone skipped on the rent and they left behind a huge upright piano, which got moved into our apartment so the other apartment could get rented out. I took to it and started playing.
I feel eternal pain for those who were killed by Hitler, but I feel no less pain for those killed on Stalin's orders. I suffer for everyone who was tortured, shot, or starved to death.
On becoming more acquainted with the word of the Bible, I began to understand so much more of what I had been taught, and of what I had learned about life and about the people in mine.
I mean the public likes it more in Europe than they do here because the state supported organizations have felt that playing contemporary music was part of the education of the public.
We musicians play in Time and with Time, but sometimes it is Time that plays with us. One day, unpredictably, the evolution of culture makes real an oeuvre which has lain in obscurity.
Doomed to total failure in a deaf world of ignorance and indifference, he inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, of whose mines he had a perfect knowledge.
The whole 'Electronica' project is about the ambiguous relationship we have with technology: on the one side, we have the world in our pocket; on the other, we are spied on constantly.
I used to play in rock bands. Then I went to the first school of electronic music in the world. It was in Paris headed by one of the most important people involved in electronic music.
All those ethereal string sounds on 'Oxygene IV' come from the VCS3. It was the first European synthesizer, made in England by a guy called Peter Zinoviev. I got one of the first ones.
We used to get on planes, and they'd ask who we were, and we'd say, 'The Dave Brubeck Quartet', and they'd say, 'Who?' In later years they'd say, 'Oh', which amounts to the same thing.
People who share the same language, French or Chinese or whatever, have the same vocal cords and emit sounds which are basically the same, as they come from the same throats and lungs.
The majors, they have to control the distribution, the record outlets, the radio and, in some cases, even the venues. And downloading and pirating have also put pressure on the majors.
Essentially my contribution was to introduce repetition into Western music as the main ingredient without any melody over it, without anything just repeated patterns, musical patterns.
To listen is to be vulnerable. You allow something outside your body to come inside. To be open and impressionable, to hear everything, is dangerous. You can be damaged all too easily.
I think I can get away, sometimes, with walking in the streets and not getting noticed. I like that. I want my work to get noticed, not me. And it's slowly getting there, which is good.
I'd never record digitally. It's not because its' a horrible way to record, it's just not the best way to record my music, because my music is rawer, darker and a little more nostalgic.
It never occurred to me that 'Phantom of the Opera' was the sort of subject that I'd want to do, because I just thought it was something that would be a bit jokey. 'Til I read the book.
In a studio context, the music becomes greater than the sum of its parts. When you have collaboration, you have other people's strengths that I don't share, so my song can get stronger.
I'm very happy with this new record. It's dealing with different aspects of love-it's me making a statement about people doing something with their lives. It is about caring for others.
She wore blue velvet Bluer than velvet was the night Softer than satin was the light From the stars She wore blue velvet Bluer than velvet were her eyes Warmer than May her tender sighs
The idea of 'machine assemblage' is, especially, very alien to my sensibility, since it suggests a relative indifference of the strata to one another during the process of construction.
Most of my favourite guitarists are self-taught, because in a way there's less of a reverence for the instrument itself, so you end up finding and inventing however you want to play it.
We all contribute to The National, and it's like a familiar family. Matt is dad, Brian's like the dark horse uncle, Scott's the long-suffering mum, and Aaron and I are the bratty twins.
The impulse of the journalist is to be novel, yet to relate his curiosities to the urgencies of the moment; the philosopher seeks what he conceives to be true, regardless of the moment.
I would do the occasional score. I thought it was the most thrilling thing. It was instant. You made the music and they played it right away to millions of people. I found it thrilling.
All these emotions are coming from one thing - sound. It's not coming from your experiences in life, your childhood. It's related to those things, but it's being triggered by the sound.
It is always advantageous to exchange your king's bishop pawn for the king's pawn, since this leads to the seizure of the centre and, in addition, to the opening of a file for the rook.
Blake Edwards has set up an extraordinary combination of moods in 'Peter Gunn.' When you stop to analyze it, you can't find the boundaries where the music stops and the show takes over.
I have played a few times in Barcelona, including the fantastic Olympic Stadium. It's undoubtedly one of my favourite cities in terms of the people, arts, food, architecture and design.
I've always been involved in the visual aspect of my work, and moreover, it's very important in days where technology allows us to push the boundaries even more than when I started out.
So OK, it's your special big Four-O birthday But don't expect me to be obsequious and fawning You, being you, can't possibly be a good example So do try, at least, to serve as a warning
Even experimental composers, revolutionary composers, self-styled radicals are, in writing revolutionary music, recognizing the music that preceded them precisely by trying to avoid it.
People who don't like musicals like, 'why are they singing? Why aren't they just talking? If you make the lyric feel really conversational, it's much easier for them to bridge that gap.
In 'Hamilton,' we're telling the stories of old, dead white men, but we're using actors of color, and that makes the story more immediate and more accessible to a contemporary audience.
As a son of a man who pretended to be one thing for 33 years of my life and then was another thing, the questions of 'what is real' and 'what is not real' are very blurrily vivid to me.
The different parts of my career seemed to take part in different rooms, albeit in the same house. It was just the way things were and I didn't actually think much about it at the time.
I was interested in opera and it seemed to me that the only possible theatre for contemporary opera would be television. So I started working towards a kind of television kind of opera.
The flame that is naturally clear always gives the most light and heat. If I could blend my talent for poetry and music into one, the light would burn still clearer, and I might go far.
Now, this one might be a little stringy, but then again, it's fiddle player." That isn't fiddle player, it's piccolo player." How can you tell?" It's PIPING hot!" Then blow on it first!
Let now the chimneys blaze And cups o’erflow with wine... The summer hath his joys, And winter his delights; Though love and all his pleasures are but toys, They shorten tedious nights.
My purpose is to create music not for snobs, but for all people, music which is beautiful and healing. To attempt what old Chinese painters called 'spirit resonance' in melody and sound.
I am not facing the problem of emigration. I want my music to be acknowledged here first of all, in this country: after that, we shall see - perhaps the question will than become urgent.
I said, look, do you think you could bring Gerry through, and they said yeah, absolutely, they thought that. Joel was very keen to cast him. If all my music team were happy, I was happy.
I know I’m an African-American, and I know I play the saxophone, but I’m not a jazz musician. I’m not a classical musician, either. My music is like my life: It’s in between these areas.
Comprehensibility is the highest law of all. Unity must be there. There must be means of ensuring it. All the things familiar to us from primitive life must also be used in works of art.