Top 165 Composition Quotes

What comprises good performance? The ability through singing or playing to make the ear conscious of the true content and affect of a composition.

My strength is looking for composition and light, and I think those things come in the quieter times of war or photographing people affected on the margins of war – civilians, refugees; that is where I really excel.

Enthusiasm is the divine particle in our composition: with it we are great, generous, and true; without it, we are little, false, and mean.

The composition of my desserts is taken care of by the farmers’ market.

Because of their chemical composition e-cigarettes are at least as harmful to your health as regular tobacco cigarettes are.

The sound itself, the production, is of such great importance that it has become an integrated part of the composition.

I started playing the piano, pretty much on my own, when I was 5, and I started writing music when I was 7. In fact, I won a composition award. It was a crummy little piece, but I won with it.

There is much modern music that is better adapted to a wind combination than to a string, although for obvious reasons originally scored for an orchestra. If in such cases the interpretation is equal to the composition the balance of a wind combination is more satisfying.

When I was out in Georgia doing photographs, I found myself trying to undo my own sense of composition. I’d think, ‘Why do I want to take it like this? Is it because I want to take a beautiful picture?’ It’s quite hard to try and undo it.

Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men.

You know, the character of Isabelle in ‘Love Crime’ is the only character I feel the furthest from. I have nothing to share with her, so it was really difficult. Being an actor of composition is something, but you always base yourself on something you know about.

Imagine filling a college with the first 1,000 students to get perfect SATs. Whatever the racial composition of that class would be, the notion seems absurd because we know that college in America is supposed to be about creating citizens and leaders in a diverse nation.

I’m older than my sister so I started writing first. I started writing at school. I was always top of my class in composition, essays, English Lit and all of that.

I’m a musician, and I feel like musicians owe it to themselves and owe it to music to concern themselves with as much of music as interests them. Even if you decide that you’re never going to compose, you will be a better performer if you concern yourself with the craft of composition.

My goal is to put out an album with every song being an original composition of mine. I want the credits to read, ‘All songs written by Gregory L. Allman’ – that is something I really want to make happen.

The chief ingredients in the composition of those qualities that gain esteem and praise, are good nature, truth, good sense, and good breeding.

When I was in high school, I became interested in cytochemistry: chemical analysis under the microscope, and trying to understand the composition of cells.

With the Larry Bertlemann portrait, I started with a photograph that I could use for it. I built the drawing’s identity to serve as a graphic identity. After a number of sketches, I went into my own abstract vernacular of drawn lines and shapes to create the composition for the poster design.

This making studies and then taking them home to use them is only half right. You get composition, but you lose freshness; you miss the subtle and, to the artist, the finer characteristics of the scene itself.

Of all the species of literary composition, perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed, which is wanting in general history.

As a director, the biggest job is to discern the imperfections in emotional tone and then view it in the global picture of what you’re trying to do, if that makes sense. It’s a rhythm, like music is a rhythm or composition and art is a rhythm. Dialogue is a rhythm as well.

I was 16 when I got a scholarship to study classical composition at a conservatory. By that time I had already listened to Scottish folksong with my mother, sung in church choirs, and had sung solo with Benjamin Britten conducting.

I don’t know the names of any pop musicians. Pop music is standardised; it’s made to please the largest audience possible. I also compose to please a large audience, but when you listen to my music, you understand that I have studied and applied the whole history of composition.

Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction.

Any government, of whatever composition, needs to mobilise opinion way beyond its own ranks in order to do the difficult things that it does.

Take ’39 Steps’. When I finished writing it, I counted the number of measures in the composition. I always do this because I am interested in the length of a song. So I counted this one a couple of times because 39 is an unusual number of measures for a song.

Well, being fit is not about flaunting muscles or biceps. Being fit is about flexibility and fit is about flexibility and body composition.

I am now in the full maturity of my age and vigor of my mind. Persons of various descriptions have repeatedly solicited me to turn my mind to dramatical composition. It was, indeed, the first amusement of my thoughts in my school-boy cell.

When I left Europe in 1987 I did so with the thought that my relevance as a composition teacher would benefit from a certain cool distance to certain tendencies I had been observing for several years with increasing disquiet.

Women continue receiving less salary for the same kind of job. Women have a higher unemployment rate in our country. When you analyze the composition of poverty, you will find that most of the families in poverty are being run by a woman.

I hate it when I’m reading a comic, and the dialogue looks like stickers stuck on top to explain what’s going on. For me the best is when your eye goes in a certain point and moves through the composition and then springs out on the dialogue, or gets confused in the image and then goes to the dialogue for an explanation.

The epic poet collaborates with the spirit of his time in the composition of his work. That is, if he is successful; the time may refuse to work with him, but he may not refuse to work with his time.

I have found that, in the composition of the human body as compared with the bodies of animals, the organs of sense are duller and coarser. Thus, it is composed of less ingenious instruments, and of spaces less capacious for receiving the faculties of sense.

I used a baritone guitar with a very unusual tuning that became the body of the composition, while the classical guitar is on top of it with the main rhythm part.

I’ve met many, many writers who say they would never write about their family, never write about people they did not totally make up. But that is not the composition of my character.

As any competent student of literary composition knows, the more natural and casual a voice sounds in print, the more likely it is to have been edited time and again.

It was always my dream to do non-film music, where I’m the voice and face of my composition.

If I’m doing a story on how a single mother copes in a refugee camp, I’ll go to her tent; I’ll follow her when she’s working, see what her daily life is like, and try to pack that into one composition, with nice light, in one frame.

The conductor’s gift does not always go hand in hand with that of composition; indeed, the union is found much more seldom than is popularly believed.

No one has the Houdini school of composition.

I consider nature a vast chemical laboratory in which all kinds of composition and decompositions are formed.

Music is what feelings sound like, and to sing a meaningfully melodious composition like ‘Suno apne dil ki’ is a rarity.

Terror works like a musical composition, so many instruments, all in tune, playing perfectly together to create their desired effect. Sorrow and horror and fear.

I am outraged that the Gorillaz have infringed the copyright of my song ‘Time Warp,’ claiming their song ‘Stylo’ to be an original composition.

I can’t measure up to Homer. His composition has survived for nearly three millennia and remains the world’s most beautiful and mournful depiction of war. But the story of the Trojan War does not belong to Homer. The characters he employs were legendary long before he was born.

There’s a lot of knowledge in civil engineering about how soils will react when subjected to heavy loads. When you take lightweight vehicles and granular soils of varying composition, it’s a very complex modeling process.

I love auditioning on tape because you have the time and the freedom to work on it, a little bit. A lot of film is slightly dependent on what your composition is and what your lighting is.

The composition of a single melody is born out of a bit of text, perhaps the first line, but it can also be the entire strophe; it can even be the poem’s overall form.

I find composition difficult. I never thought of myself as someone who can crank it out. I can’t crank it out – I have to dig it out the hard way. In some sense, you become more confident in your technical apparatus, but it becomes harder to do something you haven’t done already.

The Japanese put houses in among the trees and allowed nature to gain the ascendancy in any composition.

I love playing in Fantomas, which is very strict in terms of composition.

I think everything’s experimental whether you like it or not. I think that people who do generic pop are experimenting with cliches. It’s no less than I am experimenting with noise or unknown music – until you say, ‘This is my song, or this is my composition’ – it’s all experimental, whether you like it or not.

I want less and less control with music. Just playing music without any idea of composition or writing.

When I do a film score, I am basically nothing more than a fancy pencil for hire. I don’t own any of the music when I am – it belongs to the film company – and likewise, when I am done, even if I come up with something astounding that I may want to revisit… in the world of film composition, you can’t do that.

You know, I always when people ask me, like, what is my most favorite song, I quote Duke Ellington, when they would ask him, what’s his favorite composition? And I say, I haven’t written it yet. Because, you know, there are different songs for different occasions.

The Smiths hasn’t been equaled. That goes for the composition of the songs, the lyrics, and the performance.

And the invention of transformations of certain figures has become the most important in musical composition.

Once you’ve developed some technical facility on the guitar, the musical side (which entails theory, harmony, chord structure, ear training, sight-reading, composition and being able to hear chord progressions and licks) comes into play a lot more.

I don’t see the wisdom in modern politicians that I once saw in men like Dean Acheson, David Bruce, or George Marshall. In my day, the northeastern establishment dominated foreign policy formulation, but the composition and distribution of our population is very different today.

Usually, when Nirvana made music, there wasn’t a lot of conversation. We wanted everything to be surreal. We didn’t want to have some contrived composition.

I’ve learned that I’ve just barely scratched the surface of knowledge of the profession, and I have deep envy of and appreciation for filmmakers who really, truly understand the physics, the design of filmmaking. They can do story and color and composition and geometry and math and science all at once.

Your bones are not just made of the last meal you had, but the meals that you’ve had across many years. By looking at the composition of those teeth, researchers can say that something was a large component of the diet. This tells us a lot about how hominins lived and what they ate.

On what can we now place our hopes of solving the many riddles which still exist as to the origin and composition of cosmic rays? It must be emphasized here above all that to attain really decisive progress greater funds must be made available.

Those Dutchmen had hardly any imagination or fantasy, but their good taste and their scientific knowledge of composition were enormous.

For one, the whole concept of ‘Live From Here’ – writing a song every week – was like composition bootcamp.

My vocation is more in composition really than anything else – building up harmonies using the guitar, orchestrating the guitar like an army, a guitar army.

Consulting the rules of composition before taking a photograph, is like consulting the laws of gravity before going for a walk.

We don’t want to be Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones. That type of thing wasn’t what we were after. It was most important for each of us to be equal in input and output – each of us has to pull the same amount, musically, in composition and in every sense of being in the band.

The charge of being ambiguous and indefinite may be brought against every human composition, and necessarily arises from the imperfection of language. Perhaps no two men will express the same sentiment in the same manner and by the same words; neither do they connect precisely the same ideas with the same words.

My father taught me to paint when I was young with watercolors and so I learned at a very young age the essential elements of the value of light and composition.

My popularity has to do with the divorce between modern art, where everything is obscure, and the viewer who often feels he needs a professor to tell them whether it’s good or not. I believe a painting has to talk directly to the viewer, with composition, color and design, without a professor to explain it.

If I pick up a guitar, I don’t practise scales. I never have. I come up with something I haven’t done before, new approaches to chord sequences, riffs, rhythms, so it becomes composition. It’s not like the music I’m doing is just a single thread.

Sometimes, I am lucky because all factors are combined – composition, light, emotion – and sometimes not. Most of the time, I must be patient and wait.

No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition.

I like, ‘I Believe In Father Christmas’ – that is one of my favorites it is a lovely composition; ‘Colder Than Winter’ as well. There are so many beautiful songs.

Everything must work in concert. Composition is important, but so are many other things, from content to the way colours work with or against each other.

For pure joy, I look at a small painting by Arbit Blatas. An ocean liner is at the center of the composition, perhaps ready to depart. It holds the promise of discovery.

One might almost reckon mathematically that, having undergone the double composition of public opinion and of the author, their history reaches us at third hand and is thus separated by two stages from the original fact.

My training in music and composition then led me to a kind of musical language process in which, for example, the sound of the words I play with has to expose their true meaning against their will so to speak.

A composition is always more than the sum of its parts. In other words, a really good piece of music is more than itself. It’s sort of like a prism, which you can see from each facet a single totality.

Unprovided with original learning, unformed in the habits of thinking, unskilled in the arts of composition, I resolved to write a book.

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

The composition of a common world would be the definition of politics.

The main thing is that I’ve been studying composition for the last four years. I’d say it’s the life experience combined with the lessons that enabled me to go much further.

When I first heard the song ‘Eruption,’ which is Eddie Van Halen’s most famous solo composition, I was confused because it sounded incredible, but I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know if it was a guitar. I didn’t know if it was a synthesizer or a keyboard. I couldn’t figure it out.

One of the most beautiful things that recruited me to join the LaRouche movement is its emphasis on Classical singing and composition, especially with the Negro Spirituals, adding a new depth of profundity to songs I had sang while growing up.

Is it not the business of the conductor to convey to the public in its dramatic form the central idea of a composition; and how can he convey that idea successfully if he does not enter heart and soul into the life of the music and the tale it unfolds?

When I got to college, I didn’t take writing classes, just the standard freshman composition class.

The other thing in composition is opening up the unconscious.

If it hadn’t worked out professionally, I would be teaching music theory and composition in a small college somewhere and playing drums in a jazz trio at the Holiday Inn on weekends, and I’d be happy there, too.

Composition has almost always been solitary.

Composition is definitely what I’m born to do, and it came last.

Musical composition, about which I know little, is a complicated art, and some contemporary music may be the equivalent of a complex abstract painting.

I played trumpet in the school bands. I learned things I liked to play on my trumpet, but I didn’t learn why this note goes with this note and why it produces that sound. Or how to create tension in the composition.

I have always been willing to admit when I made a mistake. I made a mistake in my understanding of the composition of the Contras, not on my opposition to the Contra war.

Music composition was a creative call for me, and it gives me a kick. But I never thought that I would ever sing professionally, even though I used to sing a lot.

After years of doing composition, the risk is always that you might start to repeat and be cliche. Every time, I try find a way to be reborn again as an artist. Its not easy to reinvent yourself every time, as it takes a lot of creative energy, but I am happy to do it.

Sonic Youth was not a singer-songwriter band. It was an electric collective. And, whatever else people’s perceptions of Sonic Youth were, it was always about putting together a time-based composition – and that is exactly what songwriting is, in its classic form.

My dad put me with all the greatest people. It definitely helped me now, because I know so much more about music and composition. It’s cool. I love Pops. I’m super thankful for everything he’s done to help my career.

Agriculture changes the landscape more than anything else we do. It alters the composition of species. We don’t realize it when we sit down to eat, but that is our most profound engagement with the rest of nature.

There are so many different things that lend themselves to what makes a song magical, that go beyond just the lyrics or the composition. But arrangement and production and performance have such huge stakes in what makes that sort of lightning-in-a-bottle moment.

At times on overseas tours, we assess if there are more left-handers or right-handers in the opposition and accordingly, the team’s composition is set.

Lyrics is the face of any song. The combination of composition, lyrics and singing is what makes a song a song.

I’ve been a teacher at the college level, in composition mostly, and I’ve been an editor on magazines.

I pay a lot of attention to composition in my art, and I will often shift myself or change a pose according to the golden triangle rule of photography composition.

At painful times, when composition is impossible and reading is not enough, grammars and dictionaries are excellent for distraction.

A song is a short composition for voice and instruments. It is a piece of sung poetry set to music. It is usually only a few minutes long.

I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find drama. Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style.

As far as favorite ‘overall package’ record of all time, I’d have to say ‘My Girl’ by The Temptations. I like everything about it, not only the composition – but the arrangement, the production, the lead vocals, the background vocals, the horns, the strings. That one I listen to over and over again.

There are particular images that I like. Allegro is composed of a series of still life photographs that has been put to speed. There is so much care that has gone into the composition of the cinematography.

You have to know composition to be a good improviser.

I personally do not believe in politics, hatred, or anger in my musical composition.

As time has gone on, I’ve gotten bigger and bigger. My body composition has changed.

People who come up through life or literature the hard way must inevitably carry their scars with them into composition.

In my photography, color and composition are inseparable. I see in color.

I studied with Felix Blumenfeld, who had studied piano with Anton Rubinstein and composition with Tchaikovsky. Felix, my professor, was the right hand of Anton Rubinstein. Blumenfeld knew his playing by heart, from every angle.

Every time I want to impress someone about samples and hip-hop, I play ‘Portrait of Tracy.’ It’s one of the greatest bass players ever doing a whole composition with only the two harmonics of electric bass; then a three-second loop in it became every great R&B song in five-year intervals.

I don’t believe in making two songs similar. Every composition must have its own unique character.

I have a degree in music, yeah, from the University of Montana. I studied voice and composition and conducting and all that.

Listening to the stories my colleagues are researching and grappling with – in terms of access to documents, psychological understanding of their subjects, artful composition and determination to extrapolate from an individual’s life lessons and insights that we can all learn from – I am each time overwhelmed by joy.

Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.

MIDI made a natural transition to the PC. The MIDI messages that make up a musical composition can be saved as MIDI files, which are collections of MIDI messages with timing information.

Film directing has perfected my theater directing. I think when I first started directing, a lot of my stuff was very lateral; I was afraid to have the actors’ backs turned away, afraid to put them too far upstage, and I think once I did more things with film, I got more interested in composition.

I don’t think so much about verbal comedy. I always think about visual comedy. I was raised watching silents, and I’m always thinking about how to make cinema, not good talking – although I want good talking. I’m much more interested in framing, composition, and orchestration of bodies in space, and so forth.

When you know the lyrics to a tune, you have some kind of insight as to it’s composition. If you don’t understand what it’s about, you’re depriving yourself of being really able to communicate this poem.

The lives of most authors – even, or perhaps especially, the great ones – are necessarily a catalogue of tedious inwardness and cloistered composition. Globe-trotting Hemingways and brawling Christopher Marlowes are the exception, not the rule.

And harmony means that the relationship between all the elements used in a composition is balanced, is good.

I’m studying musical arts, all the way to composition. But I’m also studying theater arts, stage directing and acting.

I look at graphic design as communication, meaning that the work has to have a vibe to connect to the viewer or perceiver. I make a black and white drawing and then add color digitally, bringing in a contemporary pattern to the composition to create a vibrance.

Britain’s done a lot of changing in the past 50 years. The decline of manufacturing and heavy industry under Margaret Thatcher ripped the economic heart out of huge swathes of the country, and dramatically transformed class composition.

After the Second World War, I returned to California to study composition with Darius Milhaud, who wrote wonderful works like ‘Le Boeuf sur le Toit’ and ‘La Cretion du Monde.’ I especially enjoy his work for two pianos, ‘Scaramouche.’

A lot of my favourite songs have Eno involved, but I love the work he does on the first two Roxy Music albums. He’s creating atmospheres as opposed to composition, and it’s a beautiful mixture with everything else in that band.

Any drug that alters a female’s hormonal composition is a big deal. I have written about my journey with hormonal concoctions, and I assure you that they are nothing to be taken lightly.

Music is the medium. Words merely enhance the composition.

The well-known fact that the form of a specific substance, e.g. water, and hence its properties can alter without a change in composition was disposed of by the formal view that a physical, not a chemical, process was involved.

I started playing piano when I was eight, and I went on to study piano in school, so I have a background in classical piano and studied composition in school. Writing music came later.

When I was four years old, my mother put me into a school for early music education where you get perfect pitch and harmony and composition.

Nowadays you don’t get to see composition in a movie because nobody ever keeps the camera still long enough to see it. Actors don’t have the thrill and the power of working with space.

I’ve always felt that there’s a point where a piece seems to be alive, that is, living. And that’s the point where I know the composition is finished.

How the visual world appears is important to me. I’m always aware of the light. I’m always aware of what I would call the ‘deep composition.’ Photography in the field is a process of creation, of thought and technique. But ultimately, it’s an act of imaginatively seeing from within yourself.

When the bus or the plane rolled or flew through the night, they sang songs of their own composition about Mr Nixon and the Republicans in chorus with the Kennedy staff and felt that they, too, were marching like soldiers of the Lord to the New Frontier.

Improvising is writing, too – there was no music and now there’s music. So that’s composition. And any time you take any sort of a performance liberty, you’re making a compositional choice. I don’t know a serious performer who hasn’t made compositional decisions, who hasn’t engaged in the art of composition.

Generally speaking, exoplanets can be any size, and they are found in a wide range of orbits. Some have massive gas atmospheres; others are smaller with an icy or rocky composition.

Great progress was made when arbitration treaties were concluded in which the contracting powers pledge in advance to submit all conflicts to an arbitration court, treaties which not only specify the composition of the court, but also its procedure.

The Republican Party is a composition of the members of the party and not just the leadership.

‘Muntazir’ has a very feel-good vibe to it. It’s Strings’ signature composition, especially the pre-chorus. I thoroughly enjoyed lending my vocals to it.

There’s an ecstasy about doing something really good on film: the composition of a shot, the drama within the shot, the texture… It’s palpable.

When it comes to our ‘Jai ho,’ the song became a super hit because of the composition of Rahman… He made the tune.

Far more thought and care go into the composition of any prominent ad in a newspaper or magazine than go into the writing of their features and editorials.

Once a composition is complete I sing the track and send it to the director. He sometimes suggests I record them in my voice, and I go ahead.

Musical composition should bring happiness and joy to people and make them forget their troubles.

If you really want to be a good archaeologist, you have to understand ancient DNA; you have to understand chemical analysis to figure out the composition of ancient pots. You have to be able to study human remains. You need to be able to do computer processing and, in some cases, computer programming.

I studied harmony and composition in a very spontaneous manner.

Everybody has a right to like or dislike anything or anyone. From a flower to a flavor to a book or a composition but it is very sad that in our country we actually fight over such things in an unseemly manner.

I studied fine arts, and color and composition was always my thing, but I’ve never been too wild with my fashion.

My intention here is to make it clear that not a single cell of my composition, here in regard to The Raven, is found by chance or intuition, that the composition moved towards perfection with the precision and inevitability of a mathematical equation.

My religion lies in my composition.

Generally, I don’t pencil, especially with the autobiographical comics, although I’ve usually planed out composition in my head during the scripting stage. I like to work directly in ink, to keep the spontaneity and expression conveyed by a less worked over line.

Patriotism is strong nationalistic feeling for a country whose borders and whose legitimacy and whose ethnic composition is taken for granted.

The thing I realised about composition is, we remember most composers for four bars of music. Four singable bars of music. Pretty much any major composer from Debussy to Ravel to Mozart to whoever else – you can kind of hum it.

Now to consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk. Such rules and laws are deduced from the accomplished fact; they are the products of reflection.

What has stayed true all the way through my work is my composition, I hope, and my sense of color.

Looking out at the photographic landscape that surrounds us – the world of images and image-making that we inhabit – it seems obvious that photography has undergone dramatic changes in its technical, cultural, and critical composition.

The composition of the primary is so different than when I was first elected governor in 1978.

The guitar is the ultimate vehicle for expression and composition for me. It’s a part of my DNA!