Benjamin Britten Quotes

But there's a thin line between songwriting and arranging.

I am a person who thinks about the music first in trying to achieve something musically valid.

One thing I've tried to do in writing music is take on very basic things, very archetypal things.

Nothing pleases me more than to go into a room and come out with a piece of music.

You're just playing, playing, playing, and then an image or something will come into your mind, and basically you're just narrating it with music, letting it move along.

I don't think I approach my songs differently from other artists. You get a big picture of it, and you imagine the song and hear and feel it, and that big picture is like a snapshot, and it comes to you as fast as it takes to click a camera.

I'm obviously very keen on the theater and I think it's inevitable that some of the orchestral and chamber pieces have got dramatic elements which might even suggest an unspecified dramatic plot of some kind or other, even though it's not in my mind at the time.

A lot of what a composer does has to do with storytelling, and there are different ways of fusing music with picture to express different storytelling ideas.

Writing music is just like writing a book.

A song sometimes ends up with its own internal logic.

When I'm writing, I'm focusing more on just the basic melody and the lyrics.

Every single song I write has to feel like it has a beginning, middle, and end, like a movie or a short story.

Each song takes a different path through a different headspace.

The main objective in any song, the songs that I write, has always been that it reflect the way I feel, that it touch me when I'm finished with it, that it moves me, that it can take me along with it and involve me in what its saying.

I feel like I'm a secondary artist, a kind of a conduit for the writer, and if it's a good writer, then I have a great road map.

The beauty of a main title is that you establish your main theme and maybe a bit of your secondary theme. You plant the seed that you're going to go water later in the score. And so, having that removed just made it so much more difficult.

I try to make songs visual and tactile to kind of put you into the action.

One of my biggest thrills for me still is sitting down with a guitar or a piano and just out of nowhere trying to make a song happen.

The real challenge of writing songs isn't just writing a bunch of parts - like a verse, chorus, verse - but making something that flows together, that brings you back.

I look upon myself as a musical bricklayer with architectural aspirations.

I studied harmony and composition in a very spontaneous manner.

Each song is a lifetime, it begins and ends, and there's a journey taken within the songs.

I still do not know where the notes will come from when I accept a commission for a new work.

Beethoven's music tends to move from chaos to order, as if order were an imperative of human existence.

When I make music, it's a very visual thing. Conjures up a lot of images.