Stewart Copeland Quotes

The real exertion in the case of an opera singer lies not so much in her singing as in her acting of a role, for nearly every modern opera makes great dramatic and physical demands.

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.

There are two types of conductors. One is the good conductor who can do passionate music but also listen to the singers and do the orchestra. And then there are great conductors, who have their own opinion on the music, who are ruling everything - and not listening much to the singers, but the orchestra play amazingly.

If I can add, say, 10 great new violin concertos to the repertoire before I'm done, that will be truly exciting.

I don't care if it's a Cole Porter song, or George Gershwin, or Lennon/McCartney, or Elton John, or you know, whoever, Bob Dylan. Great songs are great songs, and they stand the test of time, and they can be interpreted and recorded with many points of view, but yet still retain the essence of what makes them good songs.

I want to make the music that's not there anymore. I'm so passionate about the singing voice... What I'm trying to do actually with my album is show that it's my voice that's leading. It's my voice that's the instrument.

It's hard sometimes if you think a character should look a certain way and you're being pushed to do it differently. I've had fights over that. That's why it's so important that you work with good people.

I never thought of myself as being a good songwriter. There are a ton of other people that are good songwriters, but I don't think I'm in the club. What I do well is perform, sometimes sing pretty good, and accompany myself well and arrange fairly well.

Composers need words, but they do not necessarily need poetry. The Russian composer, Aleksandr Mossolov, who chose texts from newspaper small ads, had a good point to make. With revolutionary music, any text can be set to work.

I treat the photograph as a work of great complexity in which you can find drama. Add to that a careful composition of landscapes, live photography, the right music and interviews with people, and it becomes a style.

I'd love to do 'Werther.' It's a great opera, and the music's so beautiful.

Which is why, in my lieder concerts, I always strove, when possible, to sing only the works of a single composer, so that the audience could be gradually drawn into a particular creative genius' way of thinking, and could follow him.

I'm not the best singer in the world; I'm just good at picking up what I want to sound like.

We all kind of grew up together with Art Blakey because we all were young and he gave us a chance to write. We had to write something that was good and to sit up with a great guy like Art Blakey and watch him.

When I write a song and come up with an arrangement and a vocal part, it's always a challenge trying to find a singer who can interpret it sort of the way that I hear it, and it's a very difficult thing to do. I mean, singing is like playing an instrument - everybody does it a little bit different - singing maybe even more so.

For someone making a pilot, assuming the talent is there and you can maneuver the system properly, it's just a matter of standing your ground and trying to make something great until you are making enough money for the studio that they let you keep making it.

I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.

Democracy can tie your hands in a rock 'n' roll band, you know? It can be a great thing, but if you've got a certain amount of vision and you write a lot of songs, it's sometimes better to have your own band and make your own decisions.

The success of the storytellers - we're only as good as what we can withhold from the audience. Aspects of surprise and letting things play out for the audience - it's so much a part of their enjoyment. It's one of the great things about working in the movies and being a great storyteller.

In film, you're so much in the hands and at the mercy of the editor, so sometimes it's good to watch it just to see how it turns out - it can be so different than how you imagined it. But sometimes it's better to just let it go for your own sense of self worth.

We didn't care if we were well-liked as long as the movies were good. We served the movie - that was our master at Miramax. In our second incarnation, the movie is still the master but we're getting the same results in more subtle ways.

Words are important to me, but a song can work and function and be a good song with words that are fairly standard. But really great lyrics can't rescue a dog of a song.

Great musicians, you don't just hear them, you feel them. When I listen to Randy Rhoads, I feel every note. I learned a lot from him.

I don't think I'd ever make an album of just covers because I love writing my own music.

I always try to get back to the original source of the song. It's not always there in the sheet music, which is sometimes just a sketchy blueprint of what the song is about.