What gives Bach and Mozart a place apart is that these two great expressive composers never sacrificed form to expression. — Camille Saint-Saens
Composers should write tunes that chauffeurs and errand boys can whistle. — Thomas Beecham
Composers in the old days used to keep strictly to the base of the theme, as their real subject. Beethoven varies the melody, harmony and rhythms so beautifully. — Johannes Brahms
I've always been heavily influenced by classical music, mostly by baroque music. — Yngwie Malmsteen
Composers shouldn't think too much - it interferes with their plagiarism. — Howard Dietz
A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians. — Frank Zappa
Well, American composers are the best composers. At this time in the world, we are where the energy is. We are the most diverse, the most iconoclastic, the most maverick, and the most skillful. — David Del Tredici
Western culture is what gave us Mozart, and Da Vinci, and Wagner, and Beethoven. — Milo Yiannopoulos
Classical music is far from boring - it has all the blood, energy, the sinister dark side, rhythm that rock music has, and all the refined, subtle sensuality that one can ask for — Yuja Wang
The composer...joins Heaven and Earth with threads of sounds. — Alan Hovhaness
Musical compositions, it should be remembered, do not inhabit certain countries, certain museums, like paintings and statues. The Mozart Quintet is not shut up in Salzburg: I have it in my pocket. — Henri Rabaud
In Bach, Beethoven and Wagner we admire principally the depth and energy of the human mind; in Mozart, the divine instinct. — Edvard Grieg
Bach is an astronomer, discovering the most marvellous stars. Beethoven challenges the universe. I only try to express the soul and the heart of man. — Frederic Chopin
What is classical music if not the epitome of sensuality, passion, and understated erotica that popular music, even with all of its energy and life, cannot even begin to touch? — Lara St. John
I tell you before God, and as an honest man, your son (W A Mozart)is the greatest composer known to me by person and repute, he has taste and what is more the greatest skill in composition. — Joseph Haydn
If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music. — Gustav Mahler
A good composer does not imitate; he steals. — Igor Stravinsky
The composer opens the cage door for arithmetic, the draftsman gives geometry its freedom. — Jean Cocteau
Give Mozart a fairy tale and he creates without effort an immortal masterpiece. — Camille Saint-Saens
It's nice to have a great female composer in the program and add her color. — Cecilia Bartoli
A symphony is no joke. — Johannes Brahms
Classical Composers Image Quotes
Forever is composed of nows.
Classical Music Quotes
Music expresses that which cannot be put into words. — Victor Hugo
At the age when Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry, I was listening to European classical music. — Satyajit Ray
One of the problems that we face through the media attention that these artists receive is that there has been an awful lot of talk about opera and classical music being elite and being for an elitist group. — Lesley Garrett
When written in Chinese the word "Crisis" is composed of two characters. One represents danger and the other represents opportunity.
A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence. — Leopold Stokowski
With the Stray Cats at least, we really took the music somewhere else. First, we wrote our own songs. That's a real weak point in modern classics if you do rockabilly or blues. — Brian Setzer
I still the love classic period, but also the baroque period, and even 17th-Century music such as the music of Monteverdi. He's one of the greatest opera composers. He was the one who really started the opera. — Cecilia Bartoli
I did not care for Wagner. My tastes are more classical. Der Fuhrer had no musical taste and liked Wagner because of the bombastic Teutonic glories. — Hans Frank
What is best in music is not to be found in the notes. — Gustav Mahler
Great Composer Quotes
Everything great in the world comes from neurotics. They alone have founded our religions and composed our masterpieces. — Marcel Proust
In my study I can lay my hand on the Bible in the pitch dark. All truly inspired ideas come from God. The powers from which all truly great composers like Mozart, Schubert, Bach and Beethoven drew their inspirations is the same power that enabled Jesus to do his miracles. — Johannes Brahms
Beauty can be seen in all things, seeing and composing the beauty is what separates the snapshot from the photograph. — Matt Hardy
A classic is a book that has never been finished saying what it has to say.
By recognizing that the chemical atom is composed of single separable electric quanta, humanity has taken a great step forward in the investigation of the natural world. — Johannes Stark
Composing gives me great pleasure... there is nothing that surpasses the joy of creation, if only because through it one wins hours of self-forgetfulness, when one lives in a world of sound. — Clara Schumann
It's a great thing about being a musician; you don't stop until the day you die, you can improve. So it's a wonderful thing to do. — Marcus Miller
To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. All other things, ruling, hoarding, building, are only little appendages and props, at most. — Michel de Montaigne
Our life is composed greatly from dreams, from the unconscious, and they must be brought into connection with action. They must be woven together. — Anais Nin
Hanifs (Muslims) are stumbling, Christians all astray
Jews wildered, Magians far on error’s way.
We mortals are composed of two great schools
Enlightened knaves or else religious fools. — Al-Maʿarri
Tim Price is one of the real ones !
A good friend and a great player ! — Phil Woods
I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer. — Richard Strauss
Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules... Mathematicians are more like classical composers. — Brian Greene
I had great inspiration from a Japanese composer named Toru Takemitsu. He wrote over 90 film scores and a lot of concert music, a lot of classical music, and he gave me a lot of inspiration, as well as composers from other countries. — Howard Shore
A Haydn symphony had a meaning for the social group that listened to it. A Mahler symphony had a meaning for the man who composed it. Here is the difference between the classical and romantic attitudes to art. — Anthony Burgess
I had a big background in listening to classical music and I started trying to compose, like I was playing the guitar but I heard an orchestra in my head. — John Fahey
I loved Hendrix. I mean, really, really loved him. As if he were one of the great classical composers. And he was. That's how I saw him. — Warren Zevon
I got into one of the Scottish classical styles called piobaireachd, which is a very old music that started around the 1700s or something. I really got into this music. After that, I started to compose bagpipe music in my notations. Then I started building bagpipes by myself, and then I started to perform with the instrument myself in the 1980s. — Yoshi Wada
For me personally - because I do it myself - the scoring of a picture is fun. I edit the picture and when I've finished I go into my room and I have many many records - jazz, classical and popular music. And I have this all at my disposal. I don't have to get a composer. — Woody Allen
I am a ham. I've no business being rock 'n' roll. I've said it over and over again that I'm a classical composer, dishevelling my personality by dabbling in rock 'n' roll. — John Cale
Salieri was a pupil of Gluck. He was born in Italy in 1750 and died in Vienna in 1825. He left Italy when he was 16 and spent most of his life in Vienna. He's the key composer between classic music and romantic music. Beethoven was the beginning of romantic music, and he was the teacher of Beethoven and Schubert. — Cecilia Bartoli
You think about, like, [20th-century classical composers] Alban Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern sitting around in some living room in Vienna and being like, "We are the end of music. We are the end of this tradition. Music is done." — David Longstreth
I grew up mostly in Champaign, Illinois. My dad was at the University of East Illinois, so I was always around the music. One of my dad's buddies was the avant-garde composer John Cage, so I picked up on that weird classical and eclectic music. — Stuart Hamm
Although in society in general, the idea of an Irish composer of 'classical music', or whatever you want to call it, is still a strange item, generally speaking. Even in the arts, among our fellow creative artists in other disciplines, you still feel slightly out of it. — John Kinsella
I grew up on Bach and Beethoven and now I'm listening to more modern composers who I can't even name. But since I'm constantly doing music, it's difficult to have that quality time to listen to music and do classical stuff. That's the only reason I'm thinking of going on. — A. R. Rahman
I've always been fascinated by music and sounds. I was lucky to receive proper classical training as an orchestra player and I'm always learning as a composer, looking to create new flavors and colors. — Lior Ron
I can think and play stuff in classical music that possibly violinists who didn't have access to other types of music could never do. It means I'm more flexible within classical music, to be a servant to the composer. — Nigel Kennedy
My mother was a classical pianist and my stepfather was an industrialist who was passionate about composing contemporary music. — Carla Bruni
A great ancient poet was blind. A great classical composer was deaf. Many of us are dumb. What have we to show for it? — Vera Nazarian
Our intention is to develop more subtlety in contemporary electronic sounds. We don't like nostalgic projects. We have disparate interests and many philosophical concerns. In the past 10 years, I have realized music in the classical tradition - I have composed for strings, brass, and electronic, and alp-horn! — Thomas Koner
I was going to say is that I come from a rock background, but also I was super interested in jazz for a long time. I was training to be a jazz musician for quite a while. I never trained to be a classical composer or player, but I did train to play jazz. — Jherek Bischoff
In some ways, it is difficult for contemporary composers to find an audience. Both men and women would love a culture that embraced and hungered for new music, as they did in the Classical period. I tell my students that they should just keep writing, write what pleases you, and don't worry about what people or critics may think about your music. — Barbara Harbach
[Phil wood] put on some [Igor] Stravinsky and say to follow the score, tell me to play me the opening to the Rite of Spring. Or, "I'm going to play you some 20th century obscure classical composer you don't know". Or, "Let's listen to some Charles Ives, let's sight read some Bartok violin duets", etc. — Jon Gordon
On one hand you have a string quartet, which is not a symphony. On the other hand is you have me sampling them and making it sound like there is many more people playing, so the whole notion of, kind of, sampling applied to classical music is very intriguing to me because composers throughout history have borrowed motifs and quotes from one another. — DJ Spooky
The realm of classical music is so vast - not only in terms of style but of era, age and the purposes for which it was composed - it is an enormous art form. — David Finckel
Classic music somehow changed, and it changed between the first and the second world wars, and somehow what happened was that the hero that had been the composer, the hero now was the performer, and especially the conductor. — Esa-Pekka Salonen
I would prefer to listen to a French classical composer like Olivier Messiaen than to the pop hits of the day. — Matt Groening
Shook is the musical universe I created. I come from a classical and jazz background and my father is a jazz pianist, so my world bears largely the marks of this influence. As a sort of gateway, I started composing my own music on the computer at the age of 13. Before Shook, I had not yet discovered the kind of music I wanted to dedicate myself to, so I did a little of everything. — Shook
Classical music, fortunately or not, unfolds in time. It's not like a picture you can stare at for 10 seconds or 10 hours. You need the minimum amount of education and training, and society needs to find a way to study music - not only the performances, but how to compose, how to understand why Mozart was great at what he did. — Carlo Grante
If one individual, or one class, can call in the aid of authority to ward off the effects of competition, it acquires a privilege and at the cost of the whole community; it can make sure of profits not altogether due to the productive services rendered, but composed in part of an actual tax upon consumers for its private profit' which tax it commonly shares with the authority that thus unjustly lent its support. — Jean-Baptiste Say
My favorite composers are the ones that tell the story. I love Wagner. I love Mahler. Prokofiev. The programmatic music. I listen more to classic rock because I don't like the contemporary music very much. — Patti LuPone
I was...attacked for being a pasticheur, chided for composing "simple" music, blamed for deserting "modernism," accused of renouncing my "true Russian heritage." People who had never heard of, or cared about, the originals cried "sacrilege": "The classics are ours. Leave the classics alone." To them all my answer was and is the same: You "respect," but I love. — Igor Stravinsky
There is nothing for it but for all of us to invent our own ideal libraries of classics. I would say that such a library ought to be composed half of books we have read and that have really counted for us, and half of books we propose to read and presume will come to count—leaving a section of empty shelves for surprises and occasional discoveries — Italo Calvino
Everything we do is music." (Classical Composer)(From: 4'33") — John Cage
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