Orchestral Composition Quotes

Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.

Composer” is a word which here means “a person who sits in a room, muttering and humming and figuring out what notes the orchestra is going to play.” This is called composing. But last night, the Composer was not muttering. He was not humming. He was not moving, or even breathing. This is called decomposing.

Yes, Carl Vine stuck around. He's now number one composer for choreography.

I had a big background in listening to classical music and I started trying to compose, like I was playing the guitar but I heard an orchestra in my head.

The 'Carousel' overture has always been one of my all-time favorite pieces of music.

I did some songs for Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby. I had done a jazz album of Roxy songs, and they used bits of it in the film. It would be nice to score a movie one day.

When I first wrote for orchestra, I didn't realize, when you have 20 people playing a violin line, that is very different than one person playing that line.

To me, Mozart is our Shakespeare, the one who wrote the most dramatic, psychologically most baffling music. He combined ideas that no one else would have thought of putting together.

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

The easiest thing I do is assignment songs. They tell me what they need me to write. I can do that fairly quickly. Writing for an orchestra is difficult. Writing songs [on your own] is most difficult of all. Though [writing for] the orchestra is close.

When I went to school, it was really just to immerse myself in listening to, studying, and making music. I came out like, "How is this going to be more than a hobby I'm always paying off debt for?" I could've sat at a desk and written pieces for orchestras that never would have been played, or I could've written music for me as a performer. I play electronics, and the places I was gonna be playing were bass clubs and house parties.

Bach's music is really some of the greatest. I think, in some ways, Bach is the most profound composer of all.

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?

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.

Jerry Goldsmith's 'Voyager' theme is a brilliant reworking of the original material.

'Canticum Sacrum' is wonderfully archaic. What Stravinsky does is extraordinary. It takes you on a journey from Gregorian chant right through to the modernism of Webern - and all in 17 minutes.

Once at the White House I was asked to conduct the Drum and Bugle Corp. The man just handed me the baton and I finished the song. It was great. I got to keep the baton.

Not with the Rochester Philharmonic, but I formed my own orchestra, made up of musicians from the Eastman School, where I'm on the faculty now, direct the Jazz Ensemble and teach improvisation classes.

When I was going to high school, in the high school band we would play these kind of hour-long concerts for our parents. All the parents would come to the gymnasium, and the band would play an hour-long kind of orchestra piece. 'Synchestra' is supposed to be similar, like a high school band orchestra piece.

It's so important which musicians we choose for being in the orchestra.

The beginning of Book Three is the last one that I drew, where V's conducting the 1812 overture.

I wanted to write songs that would play themselves on stage, songs that sweep you through their current.

There's a lot of money in doing score music. You can get a chance to get nominated for an Oscar.

I worry about being a fogy and just writing for orchestras. Like, really, I should be doing more electronic stuff, I feel. Laptops as part of the orchestra, and installation sound, and speakers.

When Beethoven's Seventh Symphony was premiered, after the second movement, they clapped so much that they had the repeat the second movement and do it again.