Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
It's amazing how fast generations lose sight of other generations. One of the first things the young composers who come to work with me say is that they want to write music people will like, instead of gaining their credentials by being rejected by the audience.
There was this kind of dictatorship of the Darmstadt school, composers like Boulez and Stockhausen, who were very strict and orthodox. They would not allow other composers to write the music they wanted to write, and only a certain kind of music could be played.
The record company started as an adjunct to that, to give young composers their first recorded performances; to give young musicians their first debut on a recording. These are all things that big record companies would never touch because there is no money in it!
My favorite instrument is the snare drum. In Scotland, the snare drum is very prominent in Highland bands. The Scottish style of playing is in my blood. It's a very powerful instrument, but it can also be soothing, like velvet. It's a real challenge for composers.
If you force yourself to write away from the piano, you come up with more inventive things. If you're too good a piano player, as some composers are, the music may become flavorless and glib. And if you're not a very good pianist, you're limited to the same patterns.
Composers and lyricists are not responsible for storyline and casting. One can imagine actors shouldering this responsibility, since they charge for half the film. But producers never ask actors to share the losses. Instead, they train their guns on composers and lyricists.
My appeal to the composers, whoever touches an old classic, will only be this much: take it up only if you can express it your way, too; work hard with the writers; make them see your new vision for the song; change the lyrics, yet, keep the soul of the original song intact.
In America, at the beginning of talkies, they pulled Fred Astaire from the theaters and put him on the screen and had all of these great composers write songs for him. They call it the Great American Songbook; I call it the Fred Astaire Songbook because they were written for him.
Before I was 5, I did have a lot of time on my hands. I had no job and really no career, and I spent an awful lot of time listening to records. It was more the classical ones, really - Prokofiev, and I think there was some Mozart in there, and more impressionistic composers like Delius.
With recording, everything changed. The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one's furniture. It's an idea that many composers have felt reluctant about because it seemed to them to diminish the importance of music.
Our industry holds a musical perception about each emotion that we depict in our narrative. As music composers, our job is either to cater to that particular need or give it a contrast that grows on the audience in a way that it begins to sound more universal, than just obvious and expected.
Many of the greatest composers and musicians do their best work in extreme confinement but we are seeing it in other fields - uses of technology to link people together in networks to solve problems and almost certainly we'll get better ideas than we would from them just doing it on their own.
Poets these days, like artists and composers, have won for themselves almost unlimited freedom. You can pass yourself off as a painter without being able to draw, as a composer without being conscious of key relationships, and as a poet without making yourself familiar with traditional verse forms.
In chess, computers show that what we call 'strategy' is reducible to tactics, ultimately. It only looks creative to us. They are still just glorified cash registers. This should make us feel uncomfortable, whether or not we think computers will ever be good composers of music or artistic painters.
De Palma is delicious! He respects music; he respects composers. For 'The Untouchables,' everything I proposed to him was fine, but then he wanted a piece that I didn't like at all, and of course we didn't have an agreement on that. It was something I didn't want to write - a triumphal piece for the police.
There are two classes of women in Soviet Russia. There is the professional class, which has taken the place of the nobility and includes government officials, artists, doctors, composers and writers as well as former members of the old nobility whose sympathy is with the Soviets, and also the peasant class.
For many years, I've always been attached to what they call the Great American Songbook, and Kern was a great leader of that because he had the classical training of Europe. He impressed all the greatest composers, like Cole Porter and Gershwin. They couldn't believe he was writing the songs he was writing.
I took classical piano for a couple of years, but I sort of lost interest - I couldn't read a note today if I tried. I still enjoy that stuff, and I think I naturally gravitate towards the classical licks; in fact, I know that I do. I gravitate towards the classical licks that I heard by famous old composers.
I don't want any of my records to sound like one style throughout. That's why I choose different grooves and songs: tunes that are sensitive and slow as well as pieces that are abstract and fast. The approach I want to take with my records is to give the listener a variety of grooves, concepts, and composers.
I think that what's been holding composers back a great deal is that they feel they must have a new style every year. This, in my case, would be hopeless. In fact, it is said that I have no style at all, but that doesn't matter. I just go on doing, as they say, my thing. I believe this takes a certain courage.
Right from the 17th century, composers who have taken up music as their means of livelihood went through a hard time financially. They were paid only for commissioned works and public performances. And, when their music became famous, orchestras in other cities and countries would pay a small amount to copy the music.
The more dollars the studio producers put in, the less freedom we have. If the budget hits $100m, they get scared - they'll take the existing score of a successful movie and expect composers to copy it, like wallpaper. The biggest challenge for any composer in Hollywood is to be as creative as possible within those boundaries.
I know that the classical world has resisted film composers throwing their hat into the classical concert music ring. And you know I don't think that's totally without justification. I think sometimes it seems to me there is a built in automatic prejudice against the whole idea of it. And it's very difficult to overcome that stigma.
I want young Indian composers to be able to do more than just film music. I want to give them the skills that will enable them to create their own palette of sounds instead of having to write formulaic music. It doesn't matter if they become sound engineers, producers, composers or performers - I want them to be as imaginative as they like.
As a young man I couldn't travel, nobody could travel, they wouldn't give us a passport. For many years I was trying to go abroad. And then one day I read in the newspaper about a new competition for composers, and the first prize was a trip to the West. I decided I must get the first prize, so I wrote three pieces in three different styles.
A whole generation of veteran composers has never taken a stand or provided an example and has produced in the music academies generations of docile workers for the music industry. What can you expect from downtrodden workers who see music as a type of profession, like stenography, and not an act of creation that by its nature is subversive?