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Composition Quotes

Browse 653 quotes about Composition.

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Composition Quotes

“Question the images. Take them by the hand and don't let the sweet distancing they offer you vanquish you; do away with the distance's comfort or the soft indifference you derive from concentrating on the quality of the framing, the use of light and shadows, the successful composition. Force these images to bring you to the Mexican Southeast, to history, to the struggle, to this taking sides, to choose a faction.”

UseHandsLightForceSidesQualityStruggleSuccessfulSweetComfortOffersShadowDistanceIndifferenceCompositionMexicanConcentratingFactionsFramingLight And ShadowVanquish
Author:Subcomandante Marcos
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“Another factor is that in terms of the original compositions, this is our strongest year yet. Everyone wrote a fantastic piece and everyone really had a greater sense of how to write for this band -- not only for this particular instrumentation, but for these particular players. Each year, the reality is getting closer to the ideal of a collective.”

WritingYearsRealityTermGreaterPiecesPlayerParticularBandIdealsOriginalsFactorsFantasticCollectivesStrongestCompositionInstrumentation
Author:Joshua Redman
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“Well, I've heard a lot of people, but I think I would say a Brazilian musician named Hermeto Pascoal was one of my biggest influences. Through the years he mastered the keyboards. He use to play the organ Hammond B3, flute, saxophone, percussion and guitar. He is one of the most complete musicians that I ever met. Not too long after we came to the United States, Airto Moreira introduced him to Miles Davis, who recorded three of Hermeto's compositions on his album "Live Evil.”

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Author:Flora Purim
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“Whenever you take a subject you're obsessed with or that haunts you, and make a movie about it, you're converting it into work units that need to be completed. You gotta turn it into a treatment, a script, a grant application, a bunch of forms to be filled out, a shooting schedule, casting sessions, auditions, shooting, editing, music compositions, the film festival circuit, interviews even. And by the time you've finished the process you're so sick and tired by something that was once very precious to you that you're done with it.”

NeedsDoneFilmFormTurnsProcessSubjectsSickFilledTiredScriptsFinishedBunchShootingObsessedInterviewsTreatmentGrantsApplicationCompositionEditingUnitsSchedulesAuditionsCastingFestivalsSessionCircuitsConvertingSo SickFilm FestivalsFilled Out
Author:Guy Maddin
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“As a senior in high school my counselor recommended that I soften my science and math direction with an art course. Fortunately my high school offered a new course in B&W photography, so I opted for that instead of art, towards which I had an aversion. Composition is something that comes pretty naturally to me and I appreciate ordered chaos: the photo class turned out to be fun.”

ArtSchoolCoursesFunClassPhotographyHigh SchoolAppreciateChaosMathCompositionSeniorAversionCounselorHigh School Senior
Author:Peter Menzel
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“RAW is very forgiving. I was photographing a farm woman in Ecuador cooking over a small fire and my fill flash didn't go off a few times. I was about to delete the RAW files but decided to play with the curves first because I like the composition. It turned out that the image, although underexposed by two stops, was better than the fill-flashed images because the fire was the only source of illumination and it looked more real.”

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Author:Peter Menzel
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“Within the context of Western music, jazz has always contained certain radical or revolutionary aspects. These are: improvisation, collective composition and individuality or the personal sound (based on amazing variations in sonority, timbre and pitch).”

CertainSoundAspectJazzWesternIndividualityRadicalRevolutionaryCollectivesCompositionVariationImprovisationTimbreWestern Music
Book:The Collected Writings of Michael Snow
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“William Ferris has long reigned as the unimpeachable source of the entire southern experience. His work on southern folklore and the composition of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture have made him both legendary and necessary. His book, The Storied South , is a love song to the South Bill helped illuminate. It's a crowning achievement of his own storied career.”

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Author:Pat Conroy
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“Mozart began his works in childhood and a childlike quality lurked in his compositions until it dawned on him that the Requiem he was writing for s a stranger was his own.”

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Book:Rousseau and Revolution: A History of Civilization in France, England, and Germany from 1756, and in the Remainder of Europe from 1715 to 1789
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“Though I consider The Chronology of Water to be an anti-memoir for very precise reasons, it is an art form, and thus as open to "critique" as any other art form. Memoir has a form, formal strategies, issues of composition and craft, style, structure, all the elements of fiction or nonfiction or painting or music or what have you.”

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Author:Lidia Yuknavitch
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“On top of whatever else I'm doing, I'm usually teaching some form of composition. The benefit of this is I get to read across disciplines. Often enough that work spills over to my creative reading/thinking, and I reach a point of saturation where I can't distinguish between texts and writers and everything starts to blur and smudge together.”

ThinkingI CanEnoughTogetherFormReadingCreativeTeachingDisciplineBenefitsCompositionSpillsBlurSaturation
Author:Gregory Pardlo
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“Metaphysics is the study of the most general nature and basic structure of reality, and therefore the concepts of metaphysics, concepts like time, space, identity, resemblance, substance, property, fact, event, composition, possibility, etc., are the most fundamental concepts. Thus metaphysics is the most fundamental theoretical discipline.”

FactsRealitySpaceStudyEventsIdentityPossibilityDisciplineConceptsFundamentalsStructurePropertySubstanceEtcCompositionMetaphysicsTheoreticalResemblance
Author:Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra
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“I hadn't studied theatre and I hadn't studied actor training or anything, but I did have a sense of movement and composition, and what the final product would be like, but luckily I had friends who were good actors, who would help me get them, who would get themselves to the place where a good director should get them to build characters.”

ShouldCharacterHelpingWould BeActorsMovementProductsDirectorsTrainingFinalsTheatreHelp MeCompositionGood ActorsGood Directors
Author:Rob Urbinati
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“At some point, sitting in the school library, during reading period, I looked up from my leopard print hardcover composition notebook where I was scribbling a derivative [John Ronald Reuel ] Tolkien epic full of purple prose in tiny handwriting and thought to myself, "Damn! I am a writer! How did that happen?".”

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Author:Vera Nazarian
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“I think, at the L.A. County Museum of Art, I saw my first example of Kerry James Marshall, who had a very sort of heroic, oversized painting of black men in a barbershop. But it was painted on the same level and with the same urgency that you would see in a grand-scale [Anthony] van Dyck or [Diego] Velazquez. The composition was classically informed; the painting technique was masterful. And it was something that really inspired me because, you know, these were images of young, black men in painting on the museum walls of one of the more sanctified and sacred institutions in Los Angeles.”

ThinkingKnowsMenFirstsArtYoungBlackLevelsSawsExamplePaintingWallInstitutionsSacredInspiredTechniqueScalesLos AngelesMuseumsHeroicCompositionVansUrgencyCountyBarbershop
Author:Kehinde Wiley
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“You have to study composition to understand that things can be done backwards and forwards and upside down, inverted, but it's mainly just an inner valid intuitive thing. Where do you want to go? Ok this is busy, or this needs some space, or this is too much space so now I want to put more notes in there or something. It's all about contrast. High, low. Fast, slow, thick or thin or what have you. And it's the same with improvisation.”

WantNeedsDoneSpaceStudyToo MuchLowsNotesBusyContrastThickCompositionBackwardsIntuitiveImprovisationUpside DownInverted
Author:Terry Bozzio
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