Top 260 Composer Quotes

As a screen composer or film-music writer, I need something that I can work with in the body of the score. Like ‘Charade,’ ‘Moon River,’ ‘Wine and Roses,’ ‘Dear Heart’ – they were all just themes that grew out of the picture.

When dubstep was big, Ubisoft told the composer for ‘Far Cry 3’ to make dubstep and to me that was really weird.

I was meant to be a composer. I was meant to meet my wife and have our three children. There were a number of factors that led to all of that happening, which, if you mapped it out, you would say, ‘God, a lot had to go right for all of those things to line up.’

Just as the great composer is seldom also a great player, so is the great mathematician seldom also a great teacher.

I like a composer called Henry Purcell, and I love to listen to Neil Young.

I didn’t know music either, but I became a composer. Acting too is like that. It’s like cooking for your siblings when your mother is away. You have a responsibility and you try to do a good job.

It is conceivable that what is unified form to the author or composer may of necessity be formless to his audience.

The grapevine in England is an extraordinary thing. When there is a really brilliant young composer or soloist, we all hear about it.

There is no doubt that the first requirement for a composer is to be dead.

My mother, Minuetta Kessler, was a concert pianist and composer who performed at Carnegie Hall and Town Hall.

I’m trying to interpret the film through the director’s head, but it all comes out through me. So, a composer is kind of like a psychic medium.

Argo’ was a very exciting project for me because I knew that I could mix together influences from my youth as a young musician and a young composer.

There is no dearth of talented lyricists and I know many of them don’t get an opportunity. After I received success, many of them approached me via e-mail or phone calls to tell me about their work. If I feel that a song written by a lyricist is fit for a film on which I am working as a composer, I give them the break.

If you’re a film composer, you have the music tell the story of the character.

In my next lifetime, I want to come back as a composer.

I never jump on to a song and say ‘I will only sing it.’ I am not too obsessed as a singer. I am happy being a composer.

I am not so complicated or intelligent a composer, nor am I very interested in becoming so. I am much more happy doing what I know I can do than what I am not sure I could do.

Pianists call me a composer, composers call me a pianist. The classicists think me a futurist, and the futurists call me a reactionary.

Many composers use software to write music – programs like Finale or Sibelius. There are also recording programs. I should say I’m still very old-fashioned, I still use pencil and paper. But almost every composer I know does it the ‘new way.’

If I do a play, it’s my vision, and everybody else is working on the production to support that. If I do an opera, I feel like part of my job is to support that composer, to try and create something that allows the composer to do his or her best work. In movies, it’s usually the director.

The old idea of a composer suddenly having a terrific idea and sitting up all night to write it is nonsense. Nighttime is for sleeping.

According to me, one composer should do one film.

I dream of a collaboration that would finally be total, in which the librettist would often think as a composer and the composer as a librettist.

A composer knows that music is written by human beings for human beings and that music is a continuation of life, not something separated from it.

As I get older, I’m slowing down and, yes, calming down in my desire to be taken seriously. That I can be entertaining and funny and high nervous energy can work against me as a serious composer, slowly but surely you’ll see me be quieter just so that people will listen.

I can admire music where you feel the composer has everything organized and perfectly shaped, but it doesn’t touch me. I like to feel that a composer is wounded, like all of us.

Remember always that the composer’s pen is still mightier than the bow of the violinist; in you lie all the possibilities of the creation of beauty.

The thing about influence is that any composer worth anything will give you the same names.

As a composer at a point where I can absolutely pick and choose what I want to do, I don’t want to write about anybody I don’t care about.

I am happy to be a composer.

I’ve come up with another formulation about style: that it’s essentially a manifestation of a certain habitual set of limitations. It’s what a composer does NOT do that defines a style.

When I write music for a film, I’m not writing a solo album, and I’m not writing a personal piece. I’m part of a team of artists. So I think like a filmmaker more than a composer.

I probably belong to a type of composer of songs who keeps thinking about melody… I am old fashioned.

I began as a violinist, not a composer. Thus my contact with orchestral musicians, with the source of music, is very important.

You become a great composer when you win a Pulitzer. But I think that now it’s a completely meaningless award.

I thought I was gonna get a doctorate in composition or be a composer and be at a university for the rest of my life, mostly because my parents are academics, and that was the logical thing to do.

My main concern is if this composer has been made aware of the fact that I’ve come clean in all of my cases. I killed in pure hate, robbing along the way. So if this person hasn’t, then I’d sure appreciate it if someone would inform him or her of it.

I usually like to introduce the film and the music with the opening titles. It’s a great help for a composer to bring the audience into the work that we’re going into.

Generally, as a composer, it’s perceived as an employer-employee relationship.

If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void.

See, as a music composer, I am not competing with any music composer.

I listen to Morricone, the famed Italian film composer, while I’m working.

The historical importance of a composer does not always go hand in hand with the quality of their work.

I’m the same composer since my first film.

Sidney Poitier and Sidney Lumet were instrumental in helping me get started as the first black composer to get name credit for movie scores.

Intelligent analysis of the composer’s intention and strict adherence to it automatically ensures sincerity.

When you think of Mitch Leigh as a businessman, remember he’s also a composer. And when you think of Mitch Leigh as a composer, remember he’s also a businessman.

To make a film, the final big collaborator that you have is the composer.

A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.

I think there’s a time as a writer when you want to see the best things in life, and you go out wherever you go with your dreams as a writer or a composer.

I can’t say I’d like to concentrate on one particular composer. I’m looking forward to doing a variety.

I’m a composer, man.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

Stepping back into theatre, a childhood dream, I always felt like I would be onstage. I hadn’t imagined myself in a composer role… I find it so satisfying to be behind the scenes and writing the music and watching it elevated and characterized by different voices than my own. It’s so exciting.

Being the composer of ‘Minecraft’ is basically like imagining the distance between earth and moon.

I’m a film composer, but I’m a hip-hop guy.

For a composer of concert music, 40 is actually very young. But for a rock musician, 40 is almost past due, where you think of rock music as really part of more youth-oriented culture.

I’m not an architectural composer.

The further the music develops, the more complex the apparatus used by the composer to express his thoughts becomes.

If I belong to a tradition, it is a tradition that makes the masterpiece tell the performer what to do, and not the performer telling the piece what it should be like, or the composer what he ought to have composed.

I never dreamed of writing for concert or opera. I always dreamed, if I was a composer, to write music for films.

For me, I’m sort of a wanna-be composer, and I love being involved with the arrangements.

It doesn’t necessarily mean at all that the composer plays his own works best.

I’m into horror pictures because I love the fear of being alone in the dark, and I’d recommend that to any composer who wants to work in this genre.

In 2015, an opera opened about me and Justice Antonin Scalia. It’s called ‘Scalia/Ginsburg.’ The composer, Derrick Wang, has degrees in music from Harvard and Yale. Enrolled in law school, he was reading dueling opinions by me and Justice Scalia and decided he could compose an appealing comic opera from them.