Morton Gould Quotes

I'm a composer like every maestro on this earth.

I consider myself a composer.

My music is simple stuff. Anybody can sit down, look at a set of symbols and produce sounds the music represents.

I'm an interpreter of music.

I've never known how to read music in my life.

I'm not an intellectual composer.

However, I began composing as soon as I started taking piano lessons.

I write music visually.

I like to create the music I hear in my interior. As a conductor, you have the ability to squeeze the sounds and interpretation you asked for from 50 to 80 people.

Originally, I wanted to be a composer. I always tell people, 'I think of myself as a composer.'

I just play music by listening and responding, so I don't know anything about writing songs or arranging and all of this stuff. You know, it's in my head, but I don't know how to get it out.

I like to see myself as a composer first and only then as a singer.

The creative process of composing music has always fascinated me.

Writing music is very, very clinical. You just sit down at a piano, map out a theme and when all the technicalities come together, out pours the music.

A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.

We all do 'do, re, mi,' but you have got to find the other notes yourself.

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

I read and write classical piano and percussion, also guitar.

I don't want to write any more for the old Man-power instruments and am handicapped by the lack of adequate electrical instruments for which I now conceive my music.

My thinking musically has always been more advanced - it is difficult to get it down onto paper sometimes, even now.

I'm kind of the town pump. I think I have a pretty good ear for what sounds good in this style.

Boulez seemed to me to be a guy who wrote laws. Like a company lawyer.

I do love using keyboards and I love writing keyboard parts, but I am not a player in the true sense of the word.

In my next lifetime, I want to come back as a composer.

I just can't read music.