Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I have a team who I respect immensely, so if they have opinions, I'm interested in hearing them.
The Getty family has been fully supportive throughout this situation, and for that, I am very grateful.
I'm very proud of 'Will the Sun Ever Shine Again.' That was a song written very close to the 9/11 event.
For a brief period, I had a gentleman's farm in Pennsylvania, but even then, I kept a place in New York.
The only way we live beyond our lives is to connect and carve ourselves into the souls of those we love.
When you have performers, there's the uniqueness of live performance and what performers do in concerts.
I never thought that I would write orchestra music, but in fact I did write a group of orchestra pieces.
The job, when you write film underscore, is to be ignored. That comes with the gig, no question about it.
Personally, I've never been popular, so I'm not surprised that professionally I'm a bit out of step, too.
The act of writing a song involves a degree of letting go of yourself, and that's very much being a child.
I've had every advantage in the world, despite the 18 years of silence which were nobody's fault but mine.
You can't make money on advertising; you just have to seed the clouds. What you're after is word of mouth.
Nicolette, Kendalle, and Alexandra are my children. Their mother, Cynthia Beck, and I, love them very much.
I think of myself as an experimentalist even though much of my music sounds logical and normal, in a sense.
In your cells right now, an enzyme is making a copy of your dna in less than two hours, right in the nucleus.
I had been creating music on tape that was to be listened to as a recording, rather than through performance.
The experimentation that I do has a lot to do with tunes and pitches and ways that melodies are put together.
Collaboration is being open to each other's ideas and benefiting from each other's perspectives in an open way.
Not exactly what the world was looking for, a musical on 'Don Quixote.' It was required reading in high school.
The Getty family has been fully supportive throughout 'double life' situation, and for that, I am very grateful.
Whenever I get asked to write orchestra music or music that is for a lot of players, I try to make it a little sad.
A lot of the projects I've been involved with have been my babies, and I'm not going to give my baby to anyone else.
When Peter Schneider first approached me about adapting 'Sister Act' for the stage, it wasn't a slam dunk to say yes.
It's still word of mouth that is going to make or break a show, and while critics can't help a show, they can hurt it.
Every couple weeks I'll listen to Sibelius's Seventh Symphony, just to check in, to see how it's doing. It's doing OK.
If the music has a logic of its own - as I think my music has - an open-minded listener will apprehend and understand.
I always wanted to have a villain song for Hades in 'Hercules,' but I couldn't figure out how we would have Hades sing.
I have lots of personal feelings of my own, but at this stage in my life and career, I'm very much driven by assignment.
Actually, if you ask my really close friends, they would say that 'Honeymoon' is more me than anything else I've written.
For me the best kind of film music is liturgical music. Liturgical music is essentially a million scores for the same film.
The score must govern the music. It must have authority, and not merely be an arbitrary jumping-off point for improvisation.
It's about one moment. It's about hitting the wall and having to make a choice, or take a stand, or turn around and go back.
I try to get underneath the skin of all kinds of music, and I never know what's going to inspire me and what makes me crazy.
In terms of my religious preference, if a year goes by and I don't have a Seder or I don't light the menorah, I feel a loss.
I have an awards cabinet in my studio where I keep my eight Oscars, my 11 Grammys, my seven Golden Globes, and my Tony Award.
My perspective on the academic world is very favorable. I did certain kinds of things that I could never have done otherwise.
I've said, for a long time, my favorite part of my career is when I'm creating a new thing where I'm pulling from a new place.
The best parts about writing a show are [its] first, second and 10th anniversaries. Everything else is relative levels of hell.
I didn't want my music to be seen as examples of an electronic culture; I just wanted them to be thought of as pieces of music.
Having a tradition is a great thing to work within, and maybe today [it] is the only way to really land musically dramatic work.
I think of myself as experimenting with different ways of structuring pieces. A lot of it has to do with the computer, of course.
I don't think there's something that you have to 'get' with my music. It tends toward the dramatic side rather than the narrative.
I wrote a lot of software to do various kinds of special things, and I loved the idea of composing pieces in an electronic studio.
I write about outsiders. I write about people who are outside and don't know quite how to get in because it's how I've always felt.
I found myself recycling ideas and I saw that I had to invent reasons to compose a piece rather than start from some exciting idea.
I'm not intimidated by embracing a familiar form and what's familiar about it and making it my own. It is, I think, one of my gifts.
There is no change - I'm as deep or as shallow as I ever was. What's new is on-the-job experience. This is what you gain with years.
New York is really the cheapest ad market. When I go on TV, I'm hitting a country. The market is as big as some countries, you know.
A villain number is a very valuable thing to have, but if you look at most musicals, one way or another there's an antagonist number.
If I do what I really want to do, I'm not going to do a typical commercial Broadway show, so I'm going to write what I want to write.