James Fenton Quotes

I am the pianist of the duo, although Aleksey does pretty good... you know we've written more and more stuff where he has to play the piano. But you know, to be very honest, I actually went into music because I wanted to be a composer and a conductor. And piano was just one of the ways to get into that.

My earliest attempts at writing were when I was seven. I would sit at the piano and transcribe the songs I heard on the radio. I'd change little things in the music and write different lyrics.

I fell into lyric writing because of music. I backed into it.

Every song has a bouquet, which is the music. If you can put words with something that is really apt, then you've done it.

In contrast, traditional classical music starts from an abstract musical schema. This is then notated and only expressed in concrete sound as a last stage, when it is performed.

Aaron Copland was a man that had a very specific point of view about what music should be which was that, he felt that new music should have the composer should show a personality in his music.

We were playing popular music, but we were doing our own arrangements because we were too lazy to sit down and figure out the originals.

When you have great songs that are going to live longer than the composers, everything you can do to bring those different elements and nuances out, serve the song.

I can take any series of numbers and turn it into music, from Bach to bebop, Herbie Hancock to hip-hop.

I started classical and operatic lessons when I was 8 and become an operatic singer and went to competition. I write my own music. A lot of the songs, growing up, I was into writing dark stories and poems, and one day I started putting melodies to them.

Music. It's all creativity right here, right now.

I write a lot of rhymes, but I don't really end up using them a lot of times, and I end up just freestyling. I like to write music, though, more than I like to freestyle, to be honest.

It's rather like attending a university seminar where you are talking to a few gifted specialists who deliver a paper to an audience of their peers. That's one way of making music.

I wrote my first song when I was six or seven, a silly little song. But I used to write poems in high school - not songs.

I love writing for dancers. You don't have to worry about the lyrics. I think to write words without music must be so frustrating. It must be always be so good, so perfect.

There's a few times in the past when I wrote a song, and I put the words together, and they were very clear pictures, and I felt like I was putting together a really good story. But I don't think I was ever really able to stay on that. What I've sort of developed lyrically is more about the sound of the vocals and what they are.

And after I compose my programs, but it is very easy because I look to the music in a very natural way without fuss, and so I look always music, in my home, like books and books and books, choose books and you read the pages, so I do this with music, and I make programs.

Composers shouldn't think too much - it interferes with their plagiarism.

When you hear Bach or Mozart, you hear perfection. Remember that Bach, Mozart and Beethoven were great improvisers. I can hear that in their music.

Nobody can give a good performance unless the authors and composers have written a good part, a fact which is often overlooked.

Trying to write music that's sensitive to 400 years ago takes a bit of madness, as it's such a long stretch of time.

I don't get my inspiration from a specific source. It's more like if you listen to a good tune, it gives me inspiration to write a better tune.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

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.

I've always said that music is like literature.