A. R. Rahman Quotes

One thing I've tried to do in writing music is take on very basic things, very archetypal things.

Film scores are often based on short themes, and it helps if you've got some way of developing these themes and making them sometimes last 4 minutes and sometimes last 40 seconds. One ends up doing it subconsciously.

I've always thought of music as something which gives the words their flight and their wings and the music often comes first, although sometimes I'll have a concept, a title idea, a lyric idea that I want to write and the lyric will come first.

I really love writing themes and melody.

A lot of what a composer does has to do with storytelling, and there are different ways of fusing music with picture to express different storytelling ideas.

It's very hard to teach someone how to write a song if to begin with there's no creative crop to harvest.

So writing a song is much harder than doing a classical piece for me, because in a classical piece, I can just let the mood dictate what's going to happen.

Melodies are important. I always kind of pride myself on my melodies.

You have certain expressions when you write music, a lot of different emotions, a lot of different feelings.

Sometimes I will click on a random sequence of notes- not to actually use it in a song, but to see if I can find maybe a simple pattern that I can build off of.

Do you think I'm wandering around all day thinking, 'I must write a song called 'Three Coins In The Fountain'?' Only an idiot would do that.

When I was 20, Shostakovich was my favorite composer. I still find his Fifth Symphony wonderful, with its outstanding themes and rhythms. That's the piece that made me want to be a classical composer.

I always think it's important to choose your initial theme very carefully because you're going to be married to it for a long time. You might have to generate an hour's worth of music from a very short, little piece of theme.

Some people start with the lyrics first because they know what they want to talk about and they just write a whole bunch of lyrical ideas, but for me the music tells me what to talk about.

I always start with the music and then try to figure out what I want to write about lyrically.

I'm a great listener - I play records all the time at home. And I play guitar as a hobby. So inspiration has never been a big problem for me, but motivation can be a bit difficult sometimes.

You're creating a score that has to have an emotional and story logic to it. You want a dramatic arc. You want all the songs to push story forward. That's the same whether it's for stage or film or television or whatever.

Musical themes developing is a lot of what classical music is based on, and exposition and recapitulation - these kinds of things I find oppressive.

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.

It's annoying when you've got a guitar and you're working on music and then you have to go and do the shopping or someone calls your mobile and you get distracted or you have to go out and do something. So it's nice to just concentrate on it one hundred percent and give your all to it.

I thought of the structure as musical. The first piece, for instance, contains the names/subject matter of every person to come in the book. Like a piece of music with themes, etc.

The very day I purchased it, I christened my guitar as my monophonic symphony, six string orchestra.

There's such a wealth of arts and styles within the guitar... flamenco, jazz, rock, blues... you name it, it's there. In the early days my dream was to fuse all those styles. Now composing has become just as important.

I do write. I actually do want to start my music as well. My sister and I are starting a band. I've been playing a guitar for nine years, and she plays piano, and we sing together. We're going to start up something soon. I mostly am writing songs right now actually, but I would love to write a script someday.

My music wasn't written by Mozart, Beethoven, Bach or Schubert. It's written by God and me. They go "a one and a two and up." We start on the downbeat. Bam! And that's where we got them.