Composition Technique Quotes

I can't sing, but I'll sing over this chord progression, like, over and over, for however long it takes - sometimes it's, like, two minutes, sometimes it's 20 minutes - until I've found like a hook or something that I'm really happy with. And then, basically, it just like that's my melody, and that's where I start from.

'6 Weeks' is broken up into two sections; both sections use the same set of samples, just in different ways.

I write the vocals last, because I wanted to invent the music first and push the music to the level that I had to compete against it.

Melody is the essence of music. I compare a good melodist to a fine racer, and counterpoints to hack post-horses.

One day when I was studying with Schoenberg, he pointed out the eraser on his pencil and said, 'This end is more important than the other.' After twenty years I learned to write directly in ink.

Silences between movements are employed only in order to bring the opposing duo to the fore.

I often write from memory by walking around and talking to myself. Even when I'm working at a computer I write out loud, so that I can hear the poem's rhythm.

Boulez, who is everything I don't want art to be... Boulez, who once said in an essay that he is not interested in how a piece sounds, only how it is made.

When I'm writing for certain instruments, you want to write within what you know about that instrument but also challenge the player. Something like 'Aheym' is very virtuosic - but because I have a history of performing music, I don't like unplayable music.

I compose melodies in my head and then interpret them musically with my guitar and keep them recorded. The guitar helps me to build unique chord structures on simple melodies.

To be honest, I don't have a particular recipe, but I normally start with the chord progression and then I build it from there. I listen to a lot of jazz, so the chords are really important to me.

Composing is improvisation slowed down.

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.

Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.

'Bright Star' has been designed and the songs have been formulated around the way that I sing. That is the biggest gift of anything.

Composing on the typewriter, I find that I am sloughing off all my long sentences which I used to dote upon. Short, staccato, like modern French prose. The typewriter makes for lucidity, but I am not sure that it encourages subtlety.

When composing music, I just start spilling things out and then wait until they take form, you know what I mean, until I see like a common thread or something.

I'll just start laying out the melody exactly where I want it to fall. And then I'll go back and fill it out. Whereas, in other pieces I'm really just going a couple bars at a time.

I don't write poetry and then strum some chords and then fit the words on top of the chords.

The way 'Lux' was made is that there are 12 sections in here, though two of them are joined together. So there are really 11 sections, in a sense, and each one uses five notes out of a palette of seven notes, and my palette is all the white notes on the piano. That was the original palette.

The way that I write is I just write a ton of music in the background of my life, and then I just bring it into rehearsal. It's, like, 'Okay, guys. It goes like this. Let's smooth it out.'

I needed another basis for musical structure. This I found in sound's duration parameter, sound's only parameter which is present even when no sound is intended.

Many times, the way I write my themes or melodies is that I hear it, and then I sing into my phone or something, or I'll scribble down on a piece of paper.

When you draw a crowd of people in a street or room or landscape, decide whether you want to say that the people dominate the place or that the place is more important than the people.

To George Gershwin, on refusinghim as a pupil: You would only lose the spontaneous quality of your melody, and end by writing bad Ravel.