Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Perhaps two million years ago the creatures of a planet in some remote galaxy faced a musical crisis similar to that which we earthly composers face today.
Today, the scope for variety has shrunk drastically. There are only a handful of topnotch composers like A. R. Rahman, Anu Malik, Jatin-Lalit... that's it.
The fact that the theatregoing public likes my music is no credit to me. There are many other composers who write better music that the public doesn't like.
I'm really drawn to West Coast composers and I think it has a little something to do with looking across the Pacific instead of looking across the Atlantic.
We talk too much of black art when we should be talking about art, just art. Black composers must be free to write rondos and fugues, not only protest songs.
It would have been more obvious to go into film, based on the generation before me, but the generation before them were all composers or classical musicians.
I was always drawn to Broadway musicals, and obviously composers like Gershwin, Rodgers, Berlin and Porter were writing music that I found wildly impressive.
But still as compared to many, many orchestras in the world, I think you find a lot more new music and living composers on our programs than many other places.
The great composers I worked with along the way, I always felt they were filmmakers more than composers. They would talk about the story rather than the music.
I feel that I belong to the 19th century. Some composers' music is very topical. It almost says, 'This is about what I read in newspapers yesterday.' Not mine.
There's a higher place that I have no illusions about reaching. There's a sophistication and aesthetic about composers who only write only for the music's sake.
Composers in the old days used to keep strictly to the base of the theme, as their real subject. Beethoven varies the melody, harmony and rhythms so beautifully.
I think all of The Beatles were from an era when certainly playing was important to them, and they were cutting edge. But for all time, they're master composers.
Other composers have taken this particular technique much further than I in the meantime, with the result that the Law of Diminishing Returns has begun to apply.
Although technical discussions are interesting to composers, I suspect that the truly magical and spiritual powers of music arise from deeper levels of our psyche.
When you have great songs that are going to live longer than the composers, everything you can do to bring those different elements and nuances out, serve the song.
In a time when directors did not fear composers with a strong voice, Morricone wrote scores like operas or symphonies, with passion, scope, bravura and intelligence.
Living composers writing for big band are very few and far between. There are not a lot of them, and I have a talent for doing it. I am zeroing in on what I do best.
This trend used to exist in Bengali playback where singers and composers would have their own hit series. I am thrilled that Bengal is seeing a revival of that trend.
Composers today get a TV script on Friday and have to record on Tuesday. It's just dreadful to impose on gifted talent and expect decent music under these conditions.
All composers who came after were influenced by Beethoven, even during his lifetime, both by his personality and by his music. He was a father figure for generations.
In Germany, people feel like they own classical music, that it is somehow theirs. Over there, everyone still learns to play, and the great composers don't seem alien.
I feel blessed and lucky that some of the film industry's most magical and iconic songs where legendary composers and singers have collaborated have been filmed on me.
Copland was one of the first American composers to forge a truly modern style of American classical music while also making use of American popular music - including jazz.
When I was offered to sing 'Tere Bina' in 'Guru' by A. R. Rahman sir, it was a surreal experience. The song clicked, and many composers took notice of me and my work then.
Then I started listenin' a lot to classical composers. Piano works. Just to see what they were doin'. That sort of put me in a different groove to try to blend all that in.
Upcoming composers in Bollywood are falling prey to the volume game, without caring what they are doing to the history of Indian music, and that's something to worry about.
As a kid, I loved classical music. Composers like Beethoven were like rock stars to me. Then there were the real rock stars: The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, and Bob Dylan.
The law is against us music composers. We have no legal control over our compositions. Music companies are selling our songs to producers at throwaway prices. We are helpless.
I began working as an assistant since the age of 16 with my father Dabboo Malik, went on to work with composers like Amar Mohile, Salim-Sulaiman, Pritam Da, and Sandeep Chowta.
I have declared that I will work free of cost with those composers who are passionate about their work. Sohail Sen is one such lad, whose music in Banjaara has been liked a lot.
I know that composers know my voice type and what songs will suit me. I have been able to mould my voice according to the nature of the song given to me, be it rock, pop or jazz.
I want Bappa to be amongst the best music composers. My father was a great singer and I also did quite well and now my son would take forward the legacy, as music is in our blood.
We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.
Singers are definitely getting their due in Bollywood. I feel that music composers, on the other hand, tend to lose out on the popularity, fame, and success that singers usually enjoy.
No two composers were more totally at home in front of the piano than Debussy and Chopin, hands to keys to strings to sound waves to pen and paper in one perfect gesture of inspiration.
My experience and growth in the film music world and the time I've spent studying legendary film composers have given me depth of insight into how music can inspire a range of emotions.
I am certain that most composers today would consider today's music to be rich, not to say confusing, in its enormous diversity of styles, technical procedures, and systems of esthetics.
Debussy is one of the few composers who actually created a new sound on the piano - or perhaps we should say a new smell, so perfumed are the vibrations which emanate from the instrument.
I would say, generally speaking, though it is not always the case, comedy is probably the least gratifying for most composers because it is more specific about what the music needs to do.
When the Domaine Musical started up, I wasn't part of it. They were the major players in contemporary music at that time, braodcasting old and new composers' work. And I wasn't one of them.
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.
The Western musical canon came about not merely by accumulation, but by opposition and subversion, both to the ruling powers on whom composers depended for their livelihoods and to other musics.
I think the reason composers aren't valued is because many act as servants rather than music directors. Instead of taking a stand based on their convictions, they sway to the opinions of others.
There are no black film composers doing the likes of Star Wars, doing the likes of E.T., doing the likes of Jurassic Park. There are none, nor will there ever be one. That ain't about to happen!
I think we have a lot in common with classical composers of the 19th century, although I'm not claiming to have their intelligence. They wanted to create a musical explosion, to blow the crowd away.
When you are a part of an all ensemble kind of thing, with many composers in one film, you get the freedom to work on one, or maybe two songs, and experiment without thinking too much about the film.
I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself, in a sense, in the mid 1960s really, when I first heard composers like Terry Riley, and when I first started playing with tape recorders.
Many composers are asked to come up with three great songs in ten days... But it's rare for us to pull that off. You cannot force the brain to make a great song and I'm very scared of doing bad work.