Composition Quotes

“Look for the light. The light is everything.”

“For me, melody is the most important thing.”

“I think that the best pictures are often on the edges of any situation.”

“I've tried to be a sponge, in a way. I've soaked up a lot of things, and I've tried to give them back in a different form.”

“Composition is a way of organizing sound, but it's also a way of organizing your life.”

“I set down a beautiful chord on paper... and suddenly it rusts.”

“What do you do with a popular melody? You can't just play it and repeat it. You have to do something with it.”

“My music is a dramatisation of the process of thinking.”

“Electronic music just has a wider palette of sounds than an orchestra.”

“The problem is to find a form that accommodates the mess.”

“My operas are about a kind of landscape of characters and events. They’re not about a particular story, like a story that you would tell your friend.”

“I don't think there's any such thing as a 'serious' composer or a 'light' composer. There are just good composers and bad composers.”

“The work of a composer is not to invent tunes but to release the music that is already there in the words.”

“What I try to do is to write a piece of music that is a unity from beginning to end.”

“My work has always been about putting things together.”

“I have always believed in the importance of dynamics, the importance of silence, the importance of space.”

“I am interested in things that are formally ambiguous.”

“I think tonality is a wonderful thing, but I don't think it's the only thing.”

“The most important thing for a composer is to have a voice of his own.”

“I discovered that the most interesting music of all was made by simply lining the loops up in unison, and letting them slowly shift out of phase with each other.”