David Del Tredici Quotes

You can find the whole world of a film in one instrument, or you can find a world of sound in the orchestra.

When you have 13 horns, and one is soloing, you have 12 people to play the richest, fullest chord you could ever imagine behind that solo.

In my piano concerto I developed this polyphony to much higher complexity.

When I think of Morricone, more than his using a specific instrument or a specific sound, it's his way of approaching music that sticks out.

Sometimes I write them down in musical notation as a trigger to remind me about certain directions to go. Or I can be specific about a sound I'm looking for.

Why write for the orchestra? For one thing it's a very challenging problem.

I often think of random melodies. And I pretty much hear in my head what I want to do with the orchestra as I'm writing on the piano.

There is no piece of guitar music that has the formal beauty of a piano sonata by Mozart, or the richly worked out ideas and passion of a late Beethoven string quartet, or for that matter the beautiful mellifluous poetry of a Chopin Ballade.

Normally when you write for an orchestra, you think about melody and harmony and countermelody.

The guitar shouldn't be a main instrument, it should be a texture. It shouldn't be important whether it's there or not. If it's important to you whether a guitar is there or not, you're weird.

When you have an acoustic bass in the ensemble it really changes the dynamic of the record because it kind of forces everybody to play with a greater degree of sensitivity and nuance because it just has a different kind of tone and spectrum than the electric bass.

I always dreamed of writing in an orchestral context. But when you finish a piece, you want to hear it. So we played everything with Phish.

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.

The baritone can serve functions that the alto and tenor cannot, in orchestral voicing.

If some of our works are symphonies, then wrapped walkways was chamber music.

Harmonies are nice.

George Martin, he's very good at a very sort of lush, sweet arrangement.

My songs are more arrangements than they are songs.

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.

Since I first picked up the violin, I've been very interested in tone and texture: I would have very visceral reactions to the texture of a snare drum or a pedal steel guitar or a violin.

Music has no subject beyond the combinations of notes we hear, for music speaks not only by means of sounds, it speaks nothing but sound.

My songs have a lot going on in them -they're packed with sounds. When I have only three or four minutes to capture something, I guess I can't stand the idea of any bar going unloved.

I am about the arrangements and the layers of depth in the music.

We decided to do some of Merle's things with modern instrumentation. We used a flute, a bass clarinet, a trumpet, a clarinet, drums, a guitar, vibes and a piano.

I'm into the whole song-as-a-piece-of-music thing: if it literally doesn't call for it, if it already has enough stuff going on, then it's okay not to play a solo.