Compositional Technique Quotes

That was my challenge as a composer. Like with anything, to keep yourself interested in doing what you do, you set yourself challenges. So I said, Okay, I'll try to write a hundred tunes in a year.

The Rhapsody is not a composition at all. It's a string of separate paragraphs stuck together - with a thin paste of flour and water... I don't think there has been such an inspired melodist on this earth since Tchaikovsky... but if you want to speak of a composer, that's another matter.

I put together the influences of my life in as clear a way as I possibly can, in the same way that Beethoven or Schoenberg or Bach put their influences together.

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.

Composers shouldn't think too much - it interferes with their plagiarism.

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?

Whether it's string writing or whatever, I try to write for what each instrumentalist can do best.

Classical music's ability to translate emotional themes is fantastic.

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

No two composers were more totally at home in front of the piano than Debussy and Chopin, hands to keys to strings to sound waves to pen and paper in one perfect gesture of inspiration.

All these tales of people sitting down and composing symphonies just as though they were writing a letter are very much exaggerated; at least, it isn't that way in my work.

I never presumed that a technique of composition or an idea was so special that just using it would guarantee the quality of the music.

Brahms' Variations are better than mine, but mine were written before his.

I'm not an intellectual composer.

This symmetrical composition--the same motif at the beginning and at the end--may seem quite "novelistic" to you, and I am willing to agree, but only on condition that you refrain from reading such notions as "fictive," "fabricated," and "untrue to life" into the word "novelistic." Because human lives are composed in precisely such a fashion.

The modern composer builds upon the foundation of truth.

In my own recent String Trio I attempt to superimpose two quite different sets of formal strategies, both of which, ultimately, refer back to historical precedent.

I write music that sounds complex but isn't. I frankly never think in terms of theory.