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.
