Top 130 Composers Quotes

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.

Composers are always going back to the past.

When I came into films, I found a vacuum in the field of lyricists, writers and composers.

I am one of the few composers who has been lucky enough to manage to do songs with female singers, despite the labels and producers wanting otherwise. They don’t believe that songs with female voices can work and often push us to work with male singers.

It’s interesting: composers can be very funny ducks.

It’s good that Bollywood is changing and directors are trying out Pakistani singers as composers.

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.

Communists love to make films about composers because composers compose music and don’t talk subversive things.

Usually composers need a reason to write. I need a deadline.

I admire Turgenev, Camus, Proust and Shakespeare, but I’ve also learnt a lot about writing from composers and artists.

Jazz has been such a force in music, that any musician, including classical composers, have been influenced, and obviously performers, also.

A hundred years ago, of course, the question that the German Composers’ Co-operative asked itself sounded a lot more fundamental: How do you create a fair share for those who ensure that works can actually be performed at all?

The composers know what they want from you. So as a vocalist you have got to trust them and surrender yourself to their vision.

A large part of my work has been collaborating with composers; I think we’ve commissioned about 140 pieces now, a lot of them percussion concertos.

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.

If we want to share the message of the composers, to give good things back to humanity, we have to dig deep while we can.

All of these people kept on being professional musicians and composers in the strictest sense.

I look at composers and conductors, anybody involved in music or writing or art in general; they got more done as they got older. If I can, I’ll be one of those people because what I do is my passion.

I don’t use composers. I research music the way I research the photographs or the facts in my scripts.

Compared with other Indian film composers, I only write about six movies a year. Others write up to 60.

I started assisting music composers at 15 in an attempt to run away from studies. But my mom, hailing from a traditional, academically inclined south Indian family influence, made me complete my degree.

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.

Gifted women musicians and composers rarely received their due.

You know creators, composers, need a palette for life, a color for life.

The great opera composers were so good at their job, that the whole genre came to be built around the concept of the composer’s vision.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What inspires me is not so much the music as the opportunity to interact with composers. I think that has driven everything I’ve done.

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.

A violin is tuned to a fifth. But a guitar is tuned to a fourth with a one-third middle. It is very perplexing to composers.

Still, American composers working in France have had a pretty hard time.

I was always drawn to Broadway musicals, and obviously composers like Gershwin, Rodgers, Berlin and Porter were writing music that I found wildly impressive.

In the beginning, many composers didn’t have confidence in me. It’s not their fault. It only comes after you’ve delivered your first hit.

You know, my career hasn’t exactly been the sort of thing that usually happens to film composers, but I sure am glad it happened to me.

Sincere composers believe in God.

Time is the main subject for any musicians, music writers, composers.

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.

I just think I started off like many composers, just in different fields of music I was doing. I started doing a lot of commercials and jingles, and then that led to doing TV and then films and games and TV.

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.

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 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.

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.

I am getting to work with some good musicians, artistes, and composers.

As far as rock groups, I really like Stone Temple Pilots. As for classical composers, it’s Bach. I love Paganini, too, the Italian composer who would break strings during a performance and finish playing on just one string. Someone I would have loved to play with is Jimi Hendrix.

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.

I would really love to do the score for movies. Pick the music and work with composers. I don’t know if I’d be any good at it, but I love music.

Film composers are the most prolific music makers on this planet, and most of us are, like, losing our minds if we’re doing five or more movies in a year.

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.

A lot of Arabic composers such as Mohammed Abdel Wahab mixed sounds and instruments from all over the world. It’s important to be able to propose new ways and new sounds without being stigmatised, censored or put aside.

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.

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.

If you look at the history of music, you have classical composers, church music, pop music, etc. Music that’s existed for centuries. I think there are some songs that are close to immortal. They will last longer than we will in this lifetime.

Nobody can give a good performance unless the authors and composers have written a good part, a fact which is often overlooked.

Good writers are monotonous, like good composers. They keep trying to perfect the one problem they were born to understand.

I loved a lot of the romantic composers.

I would still love to do more Handel. I think Handel was a fantastic composer. I did lots of Vivaldi, but it’s also important to do the music of Handel, one of the greatest composers of the 18th century.

Most theatre people and composers are like research hounds.

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.

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 are very individual creatures.

Quincy Jones’ autobiography ‘Q’ is very good. Because he’s a master at music, he’s one of our greatest composers, and its good for him to have a book and tell the good ole days when he was with Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan and Ray Charles.

Since music is a reflection of our mindset and our culture, it is bound to change with time. I am glad that India is such a receiving country and is always open to all kinds of music. Our composers, singers and writers are open to experimenting.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 would advise my young colleagues, the composers of symphonies, to drop in sometimes at the kindergarten, too. It is there that it is decided whether there will be anybody to understand their works in twenty years’ time.

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.

Chopin is a great composer who influenced many, many important composers. He was a great innovator, especially in harmony.

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.

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.

I cannot listen to Beethoven or Mahler or Chopin or Bach when I write because those composers require you stop what you are doing and listen.

Unfortunately, we have very few female composers in our country, but Sneha Khanwalkar, Alokananda Dasgupta, and Jasleen Royal are forces to reckon with.

I have always loved composers who have been connected with folk traditions of popular music.

America can well expect to develop a goodly amount of composers for she has a goodly number of people.

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.

I’ve heard though that there is a younger generation of tonal French composers who are reacting with vigour.

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.

Composers dialogue – and obsessively, bitterly argue – with other composers, often over the span of several centuries.

Our job as composers becomes easy when directors have a good knowledge of music and know exactly what they want.

I think the work process’ – composers do not get enough time to make a good song. That’s the one thing which needs to be changed.

Having an opportunity to sit down with Directors, Actors, Musicians, Writers and Composers to talk about their relationship with music, both professionally and personally is my idea of heaven.

It’s no longer unusual for real avant-garde composers to have been in a band, and for bands to be interested in a wide range of music. Look at how artists like Aphex Twin are influenced by Nancarrow and Stockhausen.

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.

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.

I live in a country where music has very little success, though, exclusive of those who have forsaken us, we have still admirable professors and, more particularly, composers of great solidity, knowledge, and taste.

Music is a continuum and the modern and avant-garde composers of today will be part of the standard repertoire 30 years from now.

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.

We love what we do. We’re passionate about making music and as composers; that’s just who we are.

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.

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.

I don’t think any of the early Romantic composers knew how to write for the piano… The music of that era is full of empty theatrical gestures, full of exhibitionism, and it has a worldly, hedonistic quality that simply turns me off.

Composers should write tunes that chauffeurs and errand boys can whistle.

It’s true that many of the best-known composers were German or Austrian, but we should remember how good the music tradition is in Britain, too, because it has an informality and a fluidity that should really be celebrated.

As improvisers, we’re acting as composers in front of people.

At school, I wrote in the style of the Dutch composers. After I graduated, a new style set in.

In a fit at the bookstore one day, I bought all my favourite composers’ biographies: Schubert, Massenet, Wolf. I’ve still not had a chance to read them; it breaks my heart. But when you travel so much, you just can’t take that many books with you.

Film music has a great history of composers and performers.

Dietz and Schwartz have sort of fallen by the wayside a little bit, and they are up there with Rodgers and Hart and Irving Berlin and Cole Porter. They are the finest of the revue composers – their stuff is so good and so strong.

It’s a really exciting thing to collaborate with production designers, cinematographers and gaffers and costume designers and editors and composers.

Many great composers have died in poverty. I have not faced hardships, like having to struggle for food, thanks to reasonable producers.

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.

The MTC is known for singing music by great master composers, hymns, American music, Broadway numbers, popular songs, and inspirational music. If the audience doesn’t like one genre, they need only wait for the next number.

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.

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.

Composers, artists, actors, singers – all of them, I think, unconsciously learn from others. I’m sure it’s not conscious, but they can’t help it.

My musical knowledge is so bad it’s embarrassing. When composers discuss music with someone as primitive as myself, they have to talk about it in terms of senses and emotion, rather than keys and tempo.

I’m blessed to be working with wizards like Vishal Bhardwaj as well as many young composers.

Composers, like authors, have a lot in common. Our main goal is to connect with the listener emotionally.

I think that live shows are more important for singers than composers, because composers still get a lot of recognition as compared to a singer.

Well, the very best operas are the ones written by the very best composers.

I think TV composers don’t get enough credit. I really think it is one of the hardest jobs.

My mother took me to Venice one time and showed me all the houses where famous composers used to live. It gave me a fascination for music and the city, but also for architecture. It was a valuable lesson.

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.

My father Apresh Lahiri and mother Bansari Lahiri were great composers of their time.

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!

Composers love to write for symphony orchestras because the symphony is the Rolls Royce of musical instruments.

Playwrights have texts, composers have scores, painters and sculptors have the residue of those activities, and dance is traditionally an ephemeral, effervescent, here-today-gone-tomorrow kind of thing.

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.

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.

Although the civil-rights movement did a lot to change how black life was dramatized on the American stage in the fifties and sixties, white composers and lyricists often still rely on familiar tropes when it comes to representing black women in musicals.

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.

So many of the sounds that contemporary composers were trying to create were to be found in the traditional musics of the world. That was encouraging but also little daunting to think that you had to work so hard to be new and yet it was old.

Composers are the only people who can hear good music above bad sounds.

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.