Thomas Powers Quotes

I just happened to start playing music for the conceptual ideas.

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.

I don't know what really makes a great musical or not. In the end, you write it, and you write it because you want to write it.

I feel it's my job as the artist who is making the music to pair it with visuals that I see in my head while writing the music in the first place.

Music is a living art.

That's all I ever do, just try and do the best I can and cater to the song, cater to the music.

It doesn't really matter what chords I play, what words I say or time of day it is, as it's only a Northern Song.

I have often read critical pieces where the critic said that what the composer was trying to do didn't come off. I have wondered what the critic meant if he didn't know what the composer was trying to do.

Music is the most important thing. I'm thinking of my future. There has to be something new, and I want to be part of it. I want to lead an orchestra with excellent musicians. I want to play music which draws pictures of the world and its space

The conductor must breathe life into the score. It is you and you alone who must expose it to the understanding, reveal the hidden jewel to the sun at the most flattering angles.

When I sit down to write a song, it's a kind of improvisation, but I formalize it a bit to get it into the studio, and when I step up to a microphone, I have a vague idea of what I'm about to do.

It's entertaining to watch somebody break my music down or explain what he thinks I was thinking during the process of making these records. Because... he has no idea.

Music runs through everything I do - I even think musically; even when I was acting, but, especially, when I am directing. Directing is very musical.

I tell my workshop students, 'I want you to think of yourselves as artists. Then, when you're writing, you're painting, you're crafting, you're making a design, you're sculpting, you're creating choreography, sound, a sound script.'

Even if you're playing Brahms or a Beethoven concerto, you've got to have a different vantage point, slightly, each time.

I'm trying to interpret the film through the director's head, but it all comes out through me. So, a composer is kind of like a psychic medium.

That's what it is that you rehearse - the making of music, not the playing of notes as abstractions.

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

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

I usually write my music on a piano, and I really enjoy performing that way, because that actually shows how the music was in my mind before it actually became an electronic song.

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'm an intuitive musician. I have no real technical skills. I can only play six chords on the guitar.

Ornette Coleman is a real musician. He takes all of the things he's thinking about in the world - which is a whole universe upon universe - and translates this into music.

Improvisation is a compositional method.

I never think about rhythm versus melody; I've always just played to what's in my head.