Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Composing is like driving down a foggy road toward a house. Slowly you see more details of the house-the color of the slates and bricks, the shape of the windows. The notes are the bricks and the mortar of the house.
Composers aren't daring enough. They're afraid of that sacred idol called 'common sense', which is the most dreadful thing I know - after all, it's no more than a religion founded to excuse the ubiquity of imbeciles!
Art is the most beautiful deception of all! And although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we must hope that it will remain a deception lest it become a utilitarian thing, sad as a factory.
Art is the most beautiful deception of all. And although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we must hope that it will remain a deception lest it become a utilitarian thing, sad as a factory.
When theology erodes and organization crumbles, when the institutional framework of religion begins to break up, the search for a direct experience which people can feel to be religious facilitates the rise of cults.
I was part of it, and I am still part of it today in terms of what it means to a whole new generation of people who are interested in the enduring energy, achievements, spirit and creativity that exemplified our era.
Well when I was young, when I was very young, when I was a little boy I don't remember the music I heard, but there was an article in the Brooklyn Daily written by my Aunt about how I could choose phonograph records.
Since hearing beauty in something is essentially a positive response and hearing ugliness is negative, might it ultimately be more difficult for an open-minded listener to define ugliness than it is to define beauty?
The great thing about a record is it frees your imagination; it gives your eyes a rest and lets your mind wander. There's the special thing that each record can mean a different thing to every person listening to it.
It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of 'culture.'
I dare suggest that the composer would do himself and his music an immediate and eventual service by total, resolute and voluntary withdrawal from this public world to one of private performance and electronic media.
Deep Listening Institute is dissolving and is now the Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). The legacy of the twenty or thirty years that we've been operating is now transferred to RPI.
The inspiration for my work comes from areas spanning the stark regions of Newfoundland to the lush and fertile valleys of the South. The landscapes offer me form; the people I've met in these places give them color.
Sometimes I observe with curiosity that uninterrupted activity which, independent of the subject of any conversation I may be carrying on, continues its course in that department of my brain that is devoted to music.
I was a common man, and I will always remain a common man. No amount of stardom will ever consume my soul. Money comes, money goes. Fame comes, fame goes. I believe every human being is a celebrity in their own right.
The best way would be education and kids and all that stuff and then education and working education comes through. Then I started a music school and the music school now teaches kids to play the violin and the viola.
I was much more interested in the orchestra than the piano, but I did become fairly proficient as a pianist and my teachers felt I had talent and wanted me to become a good concert pianist and earn my living that way.
In Evita I wasn't really hugely involved with it. I gave a little bit of help but they needed a bit of technical help on the movie and so some of my music people went in at the end of the movie and helped out with it.
When we finally came to start work on this, the joy was it was only Joel and I, we didn't have to answer to anybody, and we didn't have to submit a screen play or anything like that. We just wrote it and then made it.
A lot of people ask how I ended up doing classical music given that I'm in a rock band. The truth is that it's the other way around. I was trained as a classical musician and then started playing in a rock band later.
Most often the music does end up in the movie, and sometimes there's a point where I wish that it wasn't, just because I think the score would be more effective if there was less of it. But, again, that's not my call.
I think one of the things that makes theater special is first of all, it's one of the last places you put your phone away. And second of all, it's one of the last places where we all have a common experience together.
I felt so nourished by the process of making [Moana], of you're always engaged with other artists from different disciplines, and it's about bringing your art form to the table. It's so many art forms mashed together.
Sometimes I get the feeling that there are orgies going on all over new York City, and somebody says, `Let's call Desmond,' and somebody else says, 'Why bother? He's probably home reading the Encyclopedia Britannica.'
How absurd these critics must seem to me, who in their modern wantonness have become so ingenious. They want to interpret my Tannhauser as specifically Christian and impute to him a tendency to impotent glorification!
No one has ever known me as clearly as you. No one has ever shown me that love allows everything. Not pretty or safe or easy but something I never knew. Love within reason, that isn't love and I learned that from you.
A piano is a machine, but you've got ivory and there's weight behind the keys and you have this really - you feel the resonance in the instrument, you feel the vibration in the pedal. I mean, these a still very crude.
In the South of long ago whenever a new man appeared for work in any of the laborers gangs, he would be asked if he could sing. If he could he got the job. The singing of these working men set the rhythm for the work.
It cannot be emphasized too strongly that art, as such, does not "pay," to use an American expression - at least, not in the beginning - and that the art that has to pay its own way is apt to become vitiated and cheap.
I know perfectly well that no musician can make his thoughts or his talents different to what Heaven has made them; but I also know that if Heaven had given him good ones, he must also be able to develop them properly.
The attitude I take is that everyday life is more interesting than forms of celebration, when we become aware of it. That when is when our intentions go down to zero. Then suddenly you notice that the world is magical.
It is my wish that you may have at better and freer life than I have had. Recommend virtue to your children; it alone, not money, can make them happy. I speak from experience; this was what upheld me in time of misery.
Of course, all people have their own reasons for believing what they do about gender. In my case, in over two decades of collaborating with men and women in music - conductors or otherwise - I have seen no distinction.
I enjoy the challenge of taking something which was not meant for the piano, distilling its essence and writing or improvising it for/at the piano, but having the listener forget that he or she is listening to a piano.
Orchestration is part of the very soul of the work. A work is thought out in terms of the orchestra, certain tone-colors being inseparable from it in the mind of its creator and native to it from the hour of its birth.
Don't cry when the sun is gone, because the tears won't let you see the stars. [When you lose one blessing, anticipate, look and work for a silver lining and when you find it, you will have a new grateful perspective.]
If I'm feeling confident, then I write confident, happy, or assured music. I can hear some early electronic sketches I did where I'm clearly not confident and everything's a bit mid-range, nothing really pushes through.
There is great strength in vulnerability, as it takes courage to push through the fear and share one's true self with others. In music, that vulnerability really speaks to listeners as it connects with their own hearts.
For years The National has been labeled as a gloomy kind of rock bandI think mostly because of Matt’s deep baritone voice, which even if he is singing about unicorns and butterflies, he just sounds sad most of the time.
Victor Young had been hired to write the score for the dances of The Ten Commandments but he became very ill. You were then hired to write the score. But at the same time you'd written The Man with the Golden Arm score.
But somehow, I felt no inclination to be interested in it in any amateur way, let alone professional, until suddenly I became interested. And the first thing I did was to compose: not play an instrument, but to compose.
Yes, I was invited to make the sound environment at a booth of a huge electronic company, during the Hanover Industrial Fair in 1973. It was a job. Slightly good paid. But not as much as my producer then told the press.
I carry my thoughts about me for a long time, often a very long time, before I write them down; meanwhile my memory is so faithful that I am sure never to forget, not even in years, a theme that has once occurred to me.
No one can ever heap enough insults upon me to suit my taste. I think we all really thrive on hostility, because it's the most intense kind of massage the ego can undergo. Other people's indifference is the only horror.
I feel like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien. I cannot cast out the old way of writing and I cannot acquire the new. I have made an intense effort to feel the musical manner of today, but it will not come to me.
It was around that time, early 60s. There were like three kindred spirits in New Jersey. I had two friends who played folk music, old-time music and bluegrass and we started a little band called the Garret Mountain Boys.
When Philip Glass asked me if I would be interested in doing a new recording of Jesus' Blood he assumed that I would do something similar to the first version and wanted to know what other pieces would be on the same CD.
We're living in our neoliberal, sort of late-stage capitalist culture where human beings are really like objects of production and consumption. We're on our screens all the time; we're kind of being sold at all the time.
What terrible harm Wagner did by interspersing his pages of genius with harmonic and modulatory outrages to which both young and old are gradually becoming accustomed and which have procreated d'Indy and Richard Strauss.
The patriot subordinates himself to his State in order to raise it above all other States and thus, as it were, to find his personal sacrifice repaid with ample interest through the might and greatness of his fatherland.