Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I was fifteen years old, and I hardly knew how to play a simple Bach prelude on the piano when I began to compose music, and at the most advanced level. I had never studied such things as harmony.
Heine commenting on the music of Louis Hector Berlioz: He is an immense nightingale, a lark as great as an eagle. . . . The music causes me to dream of fabulous empires, filled with fabulous sins.
'Spring One' probably has only four bars of Vivaldi in it, but it feels like it's all Vivaldi. It's odd. It's a bit like walking around a sculpture, you just sort of see it from a different angle.
If that condition of mind and soul, which we call inspiration, lasted long without intermission, no artist could survive it. The strings would break and the instrument be shattered into fragments.
Let Pirelli's / Miracle Elixir / Activate your roots, sir... Keep it off your boots, sir- / Eats right through. Yes, get Pirelli's! / Use a bottle of it! / Ladies seem to love it... Flies do, too!
Every single song I've ever written is sung by a character created by somebody else. Some might have a jaundiced view of love, some don't. But none of these songs is me singing - not a single one.
My message is to forget about dichotomies. The Brain Opera is an opera, even if it does not tell a story in the usual way. It is a psychological journey with voices - so I do consider it an opera.
I don't even know where mine [Oscar award] is. My mother has hidden it because everybody who comes in wants to take a photograph of it. So what she's done is she put it inside a suitcase somewhere.
I had multiple circles of friends around the world. Some circles were really wild and I was affectionately known by them as 'the nerdy one.' And, with other friends, I was regarded as the wild one.
The cops picked me up for attempted murder. I can still see the detectives, licking their chops. Thought they had me. Two weeks later, the cat came out of a coma and told the truth. I was innocent.
There would seem to be a limit, even for an art preoccupied with boundaries and transgressions, beyond which a work reaches its breaking point and becomes an actual failure, a mere experimentation.
I think that place is a huge part of pretty much any musician's work, in how one responds to an environment, whether it be your actual surroundings or the more figurative place we're all living in.
The intellectual takes as a starting point his self and relates the world to his own sensibilities; the scientist accepts an existing field of knowledge and seeks to map out the unexplored terrain.
I enjoy the kind of characters that allow you to write the dark stuff. I love Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky, and when I'm writing for Dracula or Jekyll & Hyde, I get a chance to use that vocabulary.
It's like learning a language; you can't speak a language fluently until you find out who you are in that language, and that has as much to do with your body as it does with vocabulary and grammar.
If you really put a small value upon yourself, rest assured that the world will not raise your price. Pay no attention to what the critics say. A statue has never been erected in honor of a critic.
That was my challenge as a composer. Like with anything, to keep yourself interested in doing what you do, you set yourself challenges. So I said, Okay, I'll try to write a hundred tunes in a year.
The road to success leads through the valley of humility, and the path is up the ladder of patience and across the wide barren plains of perseverance. As yet, no short cut has ever been discovered.
I'm not going to hang out with celebrities, I'm not going to parties. I have two songs due for Moana next week, and I'm going to go and spend some time with Maui and Moana in the ocean, in my mind.
I was living in a suburban town north of London, dutifully practicing my Mozart sonatas. And the milkman who delivered the milk in the mornings was kind of milkman by day, composer-artist by night.
I wanted to preemptively make myself as available as possible, so it would be impossible for anyone to form the wrong impression and make me uncomfortable with the way they were digesting my music.
Working in theoretical systems can take away the juice. It can also be very beautiful, but when you're trying to satisfy a theoretical principle rather than a sonic reality, then it can become dry.
I love Australia passionately. I love our landscape. It's influenced most of my work, really. Almost everything I've written is about the landscape. Trying to find, the sacred, the spiritual in it.
Brahms stayed an extra day to hear my [Fifth] Symphony and was very kind ... I like his honesty and open-mindedness. Neither he nor the players liked the finale, which I also think rather horrible.
My symphonies would have reached Opus 100 if I had but written them down... Sometimes I am so full of music, and so overflowing with melody, that I find it simply impossible to write down anything.
Every time one can write a self-deluded song, you are way ahead of the game, way ahead. Self-delusion is the basis of nearly all the great scenes in all the great plays, from 'Oedipus' to 'Hamlet.'
The highest point of music for me is to become in a place where there is no desire, no craving, wanting to do anything else. It is the best place you have ever been, and yet there is nothing there.
You must in your music be wavering like the wind; sometimes wanton, sometimes drooping, sometimes grave and staid, otherwhile effeminate; and the more variety you show, the better shall you please.
My message is to forget about dichotomies. The 'Brain Opera' is an opera, even if it does not tell a story in the usual way. It is a psychological journey with voice - so I do consider it an opera.
To teach a child an instrument without first giving him preparatory training and without developing singing, reading and dictating to the highest level along with the playing is to build upon sand.
My list would be Russia, Morocco, Turkey, and South Africa I'm doing which is somewhere I've wanted to go, Australia, Japan maybe, and China, if I have the energy to go and play at all those places.
It may sound amazing to people today, but Rodgers and Hammerstein were considered by - how can I put it? - the sort of opinion-making tastemakers and everything to be 'off the scale as sentimental.'
Typically, people think, 'Oh the hippies and the punks hated each other,' or that those things don't go together musically. Sometimes that is true, but we had equal parts of both in our musical DNA.
When you're creating you have to descend to depths. You've just got to go there - to the boredom, the banality, the loneliness and all that. Those moments of really feeling in the flow are fleeting.
I worked hard. Anyone who works as hard as I did can achieve the same results. The final aim and reason of all music is nothing other than the glorification of God and the refreshment of the spirit.
Because of the success of 'Hamilton' and 'On Your Feet!' you can't hide behind the old argument of, 'It needs to be bankable, so we can't put all these people of color in the show.' We are bankable.
When I was a student, if you accidentally wrote a triad in a piece of yours, it was just sort of like you were breaking the law! You just couldn't do it. And that just meant you were a bad composer.
People are always defining and re-defining music. My style of playing has been characterized as smooth jazz and acid jazz. I listen as I play; I'm not caught up in defining the type of music I play.
It is a great consolation for me to remember that the Lord, to whom I had drawn near in humble and child-like faith, has suffered and died for me, and that He will look on me in love and compassion.
It's true that I love to connect with my fans on the social networking sites, but I try not to go overboard, ever. I just give people a peek into my mind space, but never bombard them with my tweets.
I'm going to take the kids away over Christmas but I don't, I've written 14 musicals now, I don't want to rush into doing something just for the sake of doing it. I want to do it when I find a story.
Other friends have said, "I don't understand why you've used this trumpet-style sound rather than a real one when you know you can write for trumpet." But it's most important to get the energy right.
I still can't believe that some pseudocritics continue to accuse me of having murdered tango. They have it backward. They should look at me as the saviour of tango. I performed plastic surgery on it.
I am certainly not arguing for the de facto autonomy of the individual work, even though there is much to be said for making the attempt to see it in that light as one facet of the reception process.
The art of music, rather more daughter than imitator of nature, in her impressive and mysterious language minding and educating us, rouses directly our temper and rules us to the depths of our souls.
The chimpanzees in the zoos do it, Some courageous kangaroos do it Let's do it, let's fall in love. I'm sure giraffes on the sly do it, Even eagles as they fly do it, Let's do it, let's fall in love.
When you are writing for an artist you are trying to get into that artist's point of view. What does that artist want to say? What do they care about? And musically, you want to show off that artist.
But it's peculiar, as soon as I am in the midst of nature and by myself, everything that is base and trivial vanishes without trace. On such days nothing scares me; and this helps me again and again.
Some producers hang-on to that old cliche that if the audience hears the music, it is no good. I say this is so much talk. Music gives the film another dimension, if it's done with the story in mind.
When you have a young man, I mean, questioning the power in place for love of his country, not to say 'stop' but to say 'be careful about the abuse of technology,' I think it deserves to be promoted.