Music composition quotes:

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Going back and forth between Western Arabic and African countries clearly created the various musical backgrounds I could have and obviously influenced my professional attitude, my way of approaching both music composition and singing, particularly phrasing. -- Rokia Traore
Monk taught me more about music composition than anyone else on 52nd Street. -- Miles Davis
It's [music composition] the most effortless thing in the world because you don't do anything. I hate to say it like that, but it's the truth. -- Michael Jackson
I allow my creativity to push me in directions that are simply interesting to me and I don't worry about the likeness of the result to some notion - some paradigm - of what music composition is supposed to be. -- Mark Applebaum
I studied piano and viola and voice in high school and music composition in college. For many years before I became an author I was a singer songwriter, writing for Disney and Sesame Street. I believe in perfect rhymes - no cheating! -- Sarah Weeks
Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction. -- E. L. Doctorow
I want less and less control with music. Just playing music without any idea of composition or writing. -- Yann Tiersen
To the average mind popular music would mean compositions vulgarly conceived and commonplace in their treatment. That is absolutely false. -- John Philip Sousa
I hated teaching composition. I was playing music I didn't particularly want to play, being on committees I didn't want to be on. -- Richard Rodney Bennett
I never presumed that a technique of composition or an idea was so special that just using it would guarantee the quality of the music. -- Robert Morris
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. -- Dave Grohl
Beethoven's importance in music has been principally defined by the revolutionary nature of his compositions. He freed music from hitherto prevailing conventions of harmony and structure. -- Daniel Barenboim
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. -- Yoko Ono
Fogs are like dreams that feed the soul, and without their mysterious embrace, childhood, courtship, poetry and the composition of music become all the more difficult. -- Michael Leunig
In serial music, the series itself is seldom audible... What I'm interested in is a compositional process and a sounding music that are one in the same thing. -- Steve Reich
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. -- Russell Smith
If you want to find the source of much of the music of modern day Russia, you will find it in the incredible compositions of that crazed lunatic Berlioz. -- Ray Bradbury
I met my wife when we were both 19 or 20, at a music school where she was taking voice and piano lessons and I was doing classes in music theory and composition. -- Rohinton Mistry
From a very early period of my life I have derived the highest enjoyment from listening to music, especially to melody, which is to me the most pleasing form of composition. -- James Nasmyth
Part of Michael's uniqueness, I think, comes from the fact that he worked with music. He had a tape which he gave me with many different compositions, really eclectic. These pieces of music were sources of inspiration. -- Madeleine Stowe
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. -- Ken Burns
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. -- Yo-Yo Ma
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. -- Elfriede Jelinek
What I try to impart to a musician is to really try to practice the instrument in a really sincere way. Learn as much about music as you possibly can. Learn composition. Study to try to create compositions of your own and put your own personal touch on your music. -- Roscoe Mitchell
The conception, composition, practice, and performance of a piece of music can blossom in a single moment. -- Stephen Nachmanovitch
Most of my music is improvisation, and composition is improvisation. Even if I have a score, it is improvisation. -- Yoshi Wada
I'm pretty optimistic about the future of rock... it will be back to composition as in classical music or jazz. -- Jimmy Page
Most of my records are very dense, composition-heavy, and there's bits of different kinds of music like an acoustic ballad, instrumental trio pieces, and vocal tracks. -- Steve Vai

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