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.
