Musical Motifs Quotes

I sleep music. I wake up, and there's a riff in my head. Every step I take, there's a riff, a beat, or something.

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.

There is a lot of melody and things that sound familiar in hundreds of songs.

I find I'm not one of these composers that are, you know, walking along a beach or walking on the mountainside in County Donegal that's, you know, 'Oh, a melody.' It's more a matter of eventually taking that moment with me to the studio, and it begins to evolve.

There's been a great development with scale on TV, but my approach is always the same across projects, whether it's a video game, a movie, or a TV show: I always try to set up my sounds and my themes. I really try to stay with the characters and do the storytelling through the music.

Writing music - particularly music without lyrics - calls almost exclusively on the subconscious.

In Sandalwood, each hero has a style and songs are composed accordingly.

Anything is food for starting a song. A song can start with a lyric idea or a melody or just a sound that inspires.

So I prefer to do the entire music for a film. And when I'm doing the background score, I can weave the whole film together in terms of themes and songs for a good cinematic feel.

I've got so much material; like, it feels as if every day I'm coming up with so many riffs.

I just write... I follow the melodies that I can't forget/the ones that pop up in my brain the most.

But the difference between the little pieces and the big pieces - I'm not actually sure which are the little pieces. With some of the big pieces, it's a lot of musical running around, whereas the little pieces, you can say everything you want to say.

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.

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.

Every day you can write a song but some days there is just some magic in the air and something special about the catch; other days you write all day on a song line or idea.

I don't think I've ever actually written from inspiration, actually had a song just go, 'Bing!' I only recall that happening to me twice - once was with 'Terrapin' and the other was 'Wharf Rat.' I mean, that's twice in a lifetime of writing!

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.

If you write songs long enough, you run out of material that's original to yourself.

I most enjoy sitting down with the acoustic guitar and just fiddling around and trying to come up with something like a hook or some sort of melodic line. That's something that I do habitually.

I still do not know where the notes will come from when I accept a commission for a new work.

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

I really believe in melody.

One of the nice things about songwriting is you can be inspired by absolutely anything.

There are only a few notes. Just variations on a theme.

On 'The Grand Budapest Hotel' I must insist that the sounds of the instrumentation are crucial to reflect what the movie should convey in terms of energy and emotion. It's not just the melody or the tune.