David Antin Quotes

That said, everything's important, and every musician who plays on the record is an integral part of it.

When I'm a part of someone else's creative process, it's all about facilitating their ideas and hopefully bringing their perspective and making it a part of a song.

Musicals are plays, but the last collaborator is your audience, so you've got to wait 'til the last collaborator comes in before you can complete the collaboration.

Improvisation is a compositional method.

My friends, we all improvise together usually. So we write what I think is a good script but always leave a lot of room to find stuff on the day; and we always do find something. That's the advantage to having actors who are, in their own right, writers.

I'm a really good team player. That's what it takes to work in the theater. That's what it takes to work in a band with musicians and writers.

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 might be like a conductor, or I collect the stuff together and I do a lot of my own writing. But what is a pleasure is the whole creative thing in which we're all excavating and trying to find something.

When I think back now to the recording sessions, there is more improvisation than one hears. It's an ideal combination of arrangements and improvisation. Only a few people are able to listen and say what is composed and what is improvised. It's a unit.

What I'm after is a composed music that will sound like improvised music when improvisors play it. You shouldn't be able to tell what parts are being improvised and what parts were written out beforehand; it should sound like the same music.

The thing that is so touching about - I can come right up and call him Mr. Simon. The thing that's great about Mr. Simon is he really uses the audience as a partner, and they tell him what's working and what's not. So he's always working on a play.

I see my songs and shows almost like a mosaic - part of a bigger picture.

Before 'Memphis,' I had never considered working on a musical. But when Joe DiPietro sent me the script, I heard the entire score in my head.

The way Beyonce works, the song is a jigsaw piece and then she will piece various elements.

My favorite thing as a performing artist is to get a pile of raw material from a writer who says, 'Will you help me make this real?' There's nothing like starting from scratch.

We don't ever write stuff individually and say, 'OK, this is gonna be the song.' We bring in ideas in their rawest form and bounce them around to find the thing that is bigger than any individual's idea.

Two people making a beat is really like one person making a beat. But you have another person's brain. So what might sound good to you, they could flip it a different way. It's really a collaborative effort, really.

I hope we [with Patrick Leonard] can come up with something orchestral with some spoken material. And I also, God willing, hope that perhaps another record of songs also might emerge, but one never knows.

I've always liked playing with somebody else and collaborating, just to get out of my own head all the time. Everybody does, but artists especially, we torture ourselves. So it's good for me to immerse myself in somebody else's work.

I don't find writing for the theater that different from writing a rock song.

There's nothing like the spontaneity of making something work on stage.

I want to continue working with actors who truly enjoy the process of acting.

I think the writer is always the creator, because he's starting with nothing, but the actor comes in and gives flesh and blood.

I've had the experience of seeing what makes life easier for an actor and for the crew, and what makes it feel bogged down and challenging. We're all really fortunate that we get to make our living as artists.

The composer does not want the self-sufficiency of a richly complex text: he or she wants to feel that the text is something in need of musical setting.