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.
