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.
A. R. Rahman
I want young Indian composers to be able to do more than just film music. I want to give them the skills that will enable them to create their own palette of sounds instead of having to write formulaic music. It doesn't matter if they become sound engineers, producers, composers or performers - I want them to be as imaginative as they like.
Compared with other Indian film composers, I only write about six movies a year. Others write up to 60.
The more dollars the studio producers put in, the less freedom we have. If the budget hits $100m, they get scared - they'll take the existing score of a successful movie and expect composers to copy it, like wallpaper. The biggest challenge for any composer in Hollywood is to be as creative as possible within those boundaries.
As a kid, I loved classical music. Composers like Beethoven were like rock stars to me. Then there were the real rock stars: The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, and Bob Dylan.
Alan Menken
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
Good writers are monotonous, like good composers. They keep trying to perfect the one problem they were born to understand.
Alberto Moravia
Composers today get a TV script on Friday and have to record on Tuesday. It's just dreadful to impose on gifted talent and expect decent music under these conditions.
Alex North
I loved a lot of the romantic composers.
Alice Merton
Tom Kitt aside - he's in his own category with me, of course - Stephen Sondheim is one of my all-time favorite composers.
Alice Ripley
We talk too much of black art when we should be talking about art, just art. Black composers must be free to write rondos and fugues, not only protest songs.
Alvin Ailey
Yes, because as composers we are looking for textured voices, and often the singers we find are not trained to perform in a studio environment. So we need technology to doctor their voices to suit the format.
Amit Trivedi
When I began, the guitar was en-closed in a vicious circle. There were no composers writing for the guitar, be-cause there were no virtuoso guitarists.
Andres Segovia
Two pieces of advice for young composers: Go away during technical rehearsals. And do not have a back operation.
Andrew Lloyd Webber
I think the thing's that perhaps sad really is that younger people haven't come in and I think it must have been absolutely fantastic to have worked in the 50's when you had all of the great Broadway composers and when West Side Story didn't win the Tony Award.
If we want to share the message of the composers, to give good things back to humanity, we have to dig deep while we can.
Andris Nelsons
All composers who came after were influenced by Beethoven, even during his lifetime, both by his personality and by his music. He was a father figure for generations.
Composers are always going back to the past.
Anne Dudley
Poets these days, like artists and composers, have won for themselves almost unlimited freedom. You can pass yourself off as a painter without being able to draw, as a composer without being conscious of key relationships, and as a poet without making yourself familiar with traditional verse forms.
Anne Stevenson
Pianists call me a composer, composers call me a pianist. The classicists think me a futurist, and the futurists call me a reactionary.
Anton Rubinstein
Composers are not all good conductors.
The composers could no longer direct all performances in person, and so the responsibility of interpreting their works in the spirit in which they had been conceived was placed upon conductors.
I cannot listen to Beethoven or Mahler or Chopin or Bach when I write because those composers require you stop what you are doing and listen.
Singers are definitely getting their due in Bollywood. I feel that music composers, on the other hand, tend to lose out on the popularity, fame, and success that singers usually enjoy.
I got my first break in 'Bhootnath,' solely on my credit, and went on to sing for around 20 films for all the leading music composers.
I think that live shows are more important for singers than composers, because composers still get a lot of recognition as compared to a singer.
I feel blessed and lucky that some of the film industry's most magical and iconic songs where legendary composers and singers have collaborated have been filmed on me.
My father Apresh Lahiri and mother Bansari Lahiri were great composers of their time.
My favourite composers are Vishal Shekhar, AR Rahman, Shankar Ehsaan-Loy.
I want Bappa to be amongst the best music composers. My father was a great singer and I also did quite well and now my son would take forward the legacy, as music is in our blood.
My mother took me to Venice one time and showed me all the houses where famous composers used to live. It gave me a fascination for music and the city, but also for architecture. It was a valuable lesson.
There's a higher place that I have no illusions about reaching. There's a sophistication and aesthetic about composers who only write only for the music's sake.
I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself, in a sense, in the mid 1960s really, when I first heard composers like Terry Riley, and when I first started playing with tape recorders.
We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.
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.
Other composers have taken this particular technique much further than I in the meantime, with the result that the Law of Diminishing Returns has begun to apply.
The Western musical canon came about not merely by accumulation, but by opposition and subversion, both to the ruling powers on whom composers depended for their livelihoods and to other musics.
Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries.
Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules... Mathematicians are more like classical composers.
The number of e-mails and letters that I get from choreographers, from sculptors, from composers who are being inspired by science is huge.
I can count on one hand the number of conductors-composers-arrangers that I enjoy working with, and at the top of that list is Mack Wilberg. I feel like I've known Mack forever. I'm just nuts for him.
The thing I realised about composition is, we remember most composers for four bars of music. Four singable bars of music. Pretty much any major composer from Debussy to Ravel to Mozart to whoever else - you can kind of hum it.
Living composers writing for big band are very few and far between. There are not a lot of them, and I have a talent for doing it. I am zeroing in on what I do best.
Most of the important composers in our country are clustered in the Northeast.
It's amazing how fast generations lose sight of other generations. One of the first things the young composers who come to work with me say is that they want to write music people will like, instead of gaining their credentials by being rejected by the audience.
I just started studying opera - very, very much as hobby - and for some reason I've been gravitating toward French composers, like a lot of Debussy and Faure. I find it a really sinuous and spooky language to sing in.
I would still love to do more Handel. I think Handel was a fantastic composer. I did lots of Vivaldi, but it's also important to do the music of Handel, one of the greatest composers of the 18th century.
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.
I've got a collection of songs that I've had, I keep adding to and they're all great American composers. I wanted to showcase American composers and I've done that on a lot of my records and played things by American composers that I really respect.
Composers, artists, actors, singers - all of them, I think, unconsciously learn from others. I'm sure it's not conscious, but they can't help it.
