Pastoral Resources

Many, many composers have only found their way to a certain form, through familiarizing themselves with texts.

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

Composers are always going back to the past.

Well, the very best operas are the ones written by the very best composers.

I think a lot of composers get into trouble just making up a plot and expecting an audience to follow that.

We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces, which represent 30% of our musical experience.

The Western musical canon came about not merely by accumulation, but by opposition and subversion, both to the ruling powers on whom composers depended for their livelihoods and to other musics.

Other composers have taken this particular technique much further than I in the meantime, with the result that the Law of Diminishing Returns has begun to apply.

Composers dialogue - and obsessively, bitterly argue - with other composers, often over the span of several centuries.

When the Domaine Musical started up, I wasn't part of it. They were the major players in contemporary music at that time, braodcasting old and new composers' work. And I wasn't one of them.

Most of the important composers in our country are clustered in the Northeast.

It's amazing how fast generations lose sight of other generations. One of the first things the young composers who come to work with me say is that they want to write music people will like, instead of gaining their credentials by being rejected by the audience.

I feel that I belong to the 19th century. Some composers' music is very topical. It almost says, 'This is about what I read in newspapers yesterday.' Not mine.

A characteristic of older folksongs, in most cases, is that we don't know their composers or authors. Older folksongs were written often with no commercial purpose in mind. They were passed down by word of mouth, from generation to generation.

Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules... Mathematicians are more like classical composers.

I've got a collection of songs that I've had, I keep adding to and they're all great American composers. I wanted to showcase American composers and I've done that on a lot of my records and played things by American composers that I really respect.

I was always drawn to Broadway musicals, and obviously composers like Gershwin, Rodgers, Berlin and Porter were writing music that I found wildly impressive.

I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First to discourage the composer from writing any more and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven.

Composers, like authors, have a lot in common. Our main goal is to connect with the listener emotionally.

Nobody can give a good performance unless the authors and composers have written a good part, a fact which is often overlooked.