Claudio Monteverdi Quotes

Today each composer is not only involved in aesthetics, but he's actually trying to create his own language.

A composer is not only an architect but also an inventor, and he should not build houses in which he cannot live.

Since age seven, I've been composing and have never stopped composing, yet, the creative process is as elusive to me as it has ever been.

A good composer does not imitate; he steals.

The day I run out of ideas is the day I stop making records.

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

If you force yourself to write away from the piano, you come up with more inventive things. If you're too good a piano player, as some composers are, the music may become flavorless and glib. And if you're not a very good pianist, you're limited to the same patterns.

When you tune your guitar in a different way, it lends itself to a new way of looking at your songwriting.

It's easy for me to write a quasi-virtuosic orchestral score. What is harder is to do that and say, all right, that works, but how else can you do it?

I believe that experimenting is what production is. But it doesn't mean much if you don't have a solid foundation in what you're experimenting with. You can't really deviate from music unless you know music; it's not gonna work.

I try to imagine what the greatest song I could ever write would sound like, and then try to do it.

Art still has truth. Take refuge there.

I find it hard to believe that the machine would go into the creative artist's hand even were that magic hand in true place. It has been too far exploited by industrialism and science at expense to art and true religion.

There's nothing like the eureka moment of knocking off a song that didn't exist before - I won't compare it to sex, but it lasts longer.

My intention is to make interesting photographs. That's it, in the end. I don't make it up. Let's say it's a world I never made. That's what was there to deal with.

The artist is the antenna of the race.

I smoked this joint and then it hit me. I thought, what you gotta do is play your own simply blues.

I began by tinkering around with some old tunes I knew. Then, just to try something different, I set to putting some music to the rhythm that I used in jerking ice-cream sodas at the Poodle Dog. I fooled around with the tune more and more until at last, lo and behold, I had completed my first piece of finished music.

Imagination is the beginning of creation.

If I saw something in my viewfinder that looked familiar to me, I would do something to shake it up.

Unless you are terribly, terribly careful, you run the danger-- without even knowing it is happening to you-- of slipping into the fatal error of reflecting the public taste instead of creating it. Your responsibility is to the public consciousness, not to the public view of itself.

Film composing is a splendid discipline, and I recommend a course of it to all composition teachers whose pupils are apt to be dawdling in their ideas, or whose every bar is sacred and must not be cut or altered.

If I could make a record in two minutes and thirty seconds, I'd do it. I want the creativity, and I don't give a f - k about the snare sound.

No man who values originality will ever be original. But try to tell the truth as you see it, try to do any bit of work as well as it can be done for the work's sake, and what men call originality will come unsought.

Art is either revolution or plagiarism