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I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First to discourage the composer from writing any more and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven.
Well, American composers are the best composers. At this time in the world, we are where the energy is. We are the most diverse, the most iconoclastic, the most maverick, and the most skillful.
The composers could no longer direct all performances in person, and so the responsibility of interpreting their works in the spirit in which they had been conceived was placed upon conductors.
For my qualifying concert, Helmut Walcha would not coach Charles-Marie Widor or any American compositions. In his defense, his forte was Germanic composers, and his forte was really a fortissimo!
I think the composer and production staff of an opera have a real responsibility to use visual elements of all kinds to make clear to the American audience, at any rate, exactly what is going on.
I don't have any background in the industry, nobody in my family or friends. So entering into the industry and dealing with the concept of being a Bollywood music composer was daunting initially.
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.
Through the Internet and technology, anyone can now seek out any artist, composer or undefined niche of music they find interesting. All on their own, without even having to stand up or go anywhere.
As a composer, every project begins with either a blank sequence or a blank manuscript and for the first couple of days you cover and experience every emotion under the sun. Fear being the main one.
For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business. He excites me when I watch him. He moves me. He's the singer who gets across what the composer has in mind, and probably a little more.
My closest friends are Roger Moore, who is an actor, Sean Connery, who is an actor, Terry O'Neill, who is a photographer, Johnny Gold, who was the boss of Tramp, and Leslie Bricusse, who is a composer.
The appreciation that we received after the release of the audio of 'Every Night and Day' is all because of Iulia Vantur. According to me as a composer of this song, she made this song sound very fresh.
I am not one of the great composers. All the great have produced enormously. There is everything in their work - the best and the worst, but there is always quantity. But I have written relatively little.
It is important for the musician to learn as much about the composer as possible and to study the music he has written. Then, even a short piece by Brahms or Chopin can be played with much more understanding.
Before I start, I create a set list that I listen to while I'm writing. For 'Intimate Apparel,' I loaded Erik Satie, Scott Joplin, klezmer music, and the American jazz performer and composer Reginald Robinson.
Because I have sixty years of being a professional composer, conductor, musician, whatever, and you develop a lot of friendships and you get involved with a lot of sort of long-term commitments and obligations.
Alan Jay Lerner needed a hit. The Broadway lyricist and librettist was a decade removed from his greatest successes when his partnership with composer Frederick Loewe produced something approaching unholy alchemy.
This whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, “Is there a meaning to music?” My answer to that would be, “Yes.” And “Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?” My answer to that would be, “No.”
I'm not a frustrated concert composer, and the concert pieces I've done have been a small part of my work. What I've sought there is instruction, variation from the demands of film and relief from its restrictions.
Scriabin, as you know, is a mystic composer. His music is supersensuous, superromantic, and supermysterious. Everything is super; it is all a little overboard. Anyway, my parents were pleased that I played for him.
The 'Story of Silent Night', which was given to me one Christmas when I was six - it was the story of a down and out composer who had no ideas left, and it was Christmas, and he came up with the hymn 'Silent Night.'
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.
As a film composer I deal with short bursts of musical ideas that are defined to a large extent by what's happening on the screen, by not only narrative and action, but staying out of the way of dialogue, sound effects.
There's an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing music, into searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don't exist.
I hadn’t realized that music could unlock things in you, could transport you to somewhere even the composer hadn’t predicted. It left an imprint in the air around you, as if you carried its remnants with you when you went.
I was the first Indian music composer to win the China Gold Award for 'Jimmy Jimmy' from 'Disco Dancer.' Adam Sandler repeated the song in his film 'Zohan.' 'Disco Dancer' is historical, as are 'Sharaabi' and 'Namak Halal.'
Composers need words, but they do not necessarily need poetry. The Russian composer, Aleksandr Mossolov, who chose texts from newspaper small ads, had a good point to make. With revolutionary music, any text can be set to work.
The thing I realised about composition is, we remember most composers for four bars of music. Four singable bars of music. Pretty much any major composer from Debussy to Ravel to Mozart to whoever else - you can kind of hum it.
Becoming a father allowed me to become a much better composer, because it allowed me to have tremendous patience. I have much more tolerance for opposing opinions, short attention spans, changes of heart. And faith in the future.
That's what I love - on 'The Farewell,' we played with a lot of silence and a lot of negative space, and I really worked with the composer to create those juxtapositions of like, those awkward silences and when something comes in.
If somebody says, 'Well, what are your favorite composers?' really, what they are saying is, 'What are your favorite composers apart from Bach?' Because obviously, Bach is your favorite composer if you are involved in music at all.
In a way, the highest praise you could give to a composer like Bach was to take and make your own arrangement; it was sort of an homage to that composer and to his work, so it wasn't considered sacrilegious to do something like that.
Has the painter not always gone to an art school, or at least to an established master, for instruction? And the composer, the sculptor, the architect? Then why not the writer? Good poets, like good hybrid corn, are both born and made.
The wild thing is that when I'm in the band, I can control my destiny with four other guys. As a composer sitting in the audience, you can throw good vibes at everybody, but you can't control anybody's destiny, so it's really unsettling.
One of the advantages I've had as an interpreter - because I'm not a composer - is I've had the fortune of working with great composers. Armando Manzanero, Rafael Perez Botija, Manuel Alejandro. These are the people who have built my career.
Writing is a little athletic for me. I get worked up a little bit when I do it. So I guess I'm a little bit like that composer conducting. There are a lot of things that go into what I do, but I think athletics really sort of shaped my ethic.
When I'm writing film music, I feel like I'm more a filmmaker than a composer. It's more about what the film needs. I'm basically part of the team that's creating a film, and the music is a very important part, but it's just one part of many.
I think the purpose of a piece of music is significant when it actually lives in somebody else. A composer puts down a code, and a performer can activate the code in somebody else. Once it lives in somebody else, it can live in others as well.
I really liked doing a number of the projects and directors, and etc., etc., I knew about half-way through that I would never be doing that again. It's just not me. I really am happy as a part-time film composer, not a full-time film composer.
I don't claim to be a composer, and I realize my approach is pretty dopey in comparison to the true masters of score work. That said, if someone thinks what I do specifically would work for their film, then, of course, let's see what we can do.
So, it becomes an exercise in futility if you write something that does not express the film as the director wishes. It's still their ball game. It's their show. I think any successful composer learns how to dance around the director's impulses.
I think every classically trained film composer feels to some extent, maybe on some level, that they took the low road, that they could have maybe pursued a career in the concert music world, and perhaps been involved in a higher quality of music.
You have to face the fact that I have no reputation as a composer; I have my reputation as a songwriter and a performer-and that opportunity came this summer, when I was invited to perform at the Lincoln Centre festival in New York... three nights.
I just wanted to be a composer; I became an actor by default, really. I got a scholarship to a college of music and drama, hoping to take a scholarship in music. But I ended up as an acting student, so I've stuck with that for the last 50-odd years.
Almost all the producers I know and dig, like Quincy Jones or Brian Eno, are really musicians first. I'm a composer, an orchestrator, an arranger and a musician first. I know how to write and rewrite songs, and the genius is really in the rewriting.
I guess the passion I have for cinema is as strong as the one that I have for music. And I've always tried to be a character in the film, not just a composer that throws his music to the film. That's the main element that connects me with directors.
Music critics have made it quite clear that any composer who ever contributed a four-bar jingle to a film was to be referred to as a 'Hollywood composer' from then on, even if the rest of his output were to consist solely of liturgical organ sonatas.
Elizabeth Lutyens was the first professional composer that I ever knew. I sent someextremely infantile pieces that I I'd written and got marvellous encouragement andinterest from her... she's certainly the English composer who's influenced me themost.
At the same time, one of the things I noticed was that the moment there was any kind of audio attached to virtual reality, it really improved the experience, even though the audio didn't feel like a sound engineer or composer had been anywhere near it.
Any working composer or painter or sculptor will tell you that inspiration comes at the eighth hour of labour rather than as a bolt out of the blue. We have to get our vanities and our preconceptions out of the way and do the work in the time allotted.