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.
