Music from composers quotes:

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In many ways I'm an experimental and new music composer that comes from a rural tradition rather than an urban one. -- Sxip Shirey
Music is a continuum and the modern and avant-garde composers of today will be part of the standard repertoire 30 years from now. -- Neville Marriner
Although technical discussions are interesting to composers, I suspect that the truly magical and spiritual powers of music arise from deeper levels of our psyche. -- George Crumb
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. -- Hanns Eisler
I dare suggest that the composer would do himself and his music an immediate and eventual service by total, resolute and voluntary withdrawal from this public world to one of private performance and electronic media. -- Milton Babbitt
Composers need words, but they do not necessarily need poetry. The Russian composer, Aleksandr Mossolov, who chose texts from newspaper small ads, had a good point to make. With revolutionary music, any text can be set to work. -- James Fenton
Music is at once the product of feeling and knowledge, for it requires from its disciples, composers and performers alike, not only talent and enthusiasm, but also that knowledge and perception which are the result of protracted study and reflection. -- Alban Berg
My tastes went all over the place, from Strauss to Mahler. I was never a big Wagner or Tchaikovsky fan. Benjamin Britten, Tallis, all the early English Medieval music, Prokofiev, some Russian composers, mostly the people that were the colorists, the French. -- James Horner
If you force yourself to write away from the piano, you come up with more inventive things. If you're too good a piano player, as some composers are, the music may become flavorless and glib. And if you're not a very good pianist, you're limited to the same patterns. -- Stephen Sondheim
With recording, everything changed. The prospect of music being detachable from time and place meant that one could start to think of music as a part of one's furniture. It's an idea that many composers have felt reluctant about because it seemed to them to diminish the importance of music. -- Brian Eno
It is my hope that during my brief passage through this universe, that I may share with you the joy of hearing the music of the stars... knowing that the composer was from a distant place and the songs were written eons ago, which now fall gently on this place for all to hear. -- Richard H. Baker
A whole generation of veteran composers has never taken a stand or provided an example and has produced in the music academies generations of docile workers for the music industry. What can you expect from downtrodden workers who see music as a type of profession, like stenography, and not an act of creation that by its nature is subversive? -- Itay Talgam

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