“What inspires me is not so much the music as the opportunity to interact with composers. I think that has driven everything I've done.” ThinkingDoneOpportunityInspireDrivenComposer Author:Robert Moog
“As a composer, I believe that music has the power to inspire a renewal of human consciousness, culture, and politics. And yet I refuse to make political art. More often than not political art fails as politics, and all too often it fails as art. To reach its fullest power, to be most moving and most fully useful to us, art must be itself.” BelieveHumansArtMovingPoliticalCultureI BelieveConsciousnessFailingInspireRefuseComposerRenewalHuman ConsciousnessPolitical Art Author:John Luther Adams
“The most important thing to remember is that the composer is a senior partner. You cannot force a subject on a composer if it doesn't inspire him. He has to take the lead, you are an enabler, and you are creating the enabling conditions under which he can write great music. Your words are secondary. Many librettists in opera collaborations in the past have forgotten this, or not known it, or refuse to accept it and tried to get out in front of the creative process and it just doesn't work that way.” WritingImportantPastRememberAcceptingCreativeInspireForgottenCollaborationComposerCreative ProcessSeniorGreat Music Author:Terry Teachout
“Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.” ProcessMusicMankindInspireMusic IsWinePressesPianoGloriousComposerPlaying MusicFunny MusicBest WineBacchus Author:Ludwig van Beethoven
“Why should the composer be more guilty than the poet who warms to fantasy by a strange flame, making an idea that inspires him the subject of his own very different treatment?” ShouldIdeasDifferentFantasySubjectsInspireStrangePoetGuiltyFlamesTreatmentComposer Author:Franz Schubert
“I don't ascribe to the idea of the ivory tower composer who sits alone in a room composing his masterpieces and then comes down from Mount Sinai with the tablets. It doesn't work like that. The job of a composer is putting something down on a piece of paper that will inspire the person who's playing.” PersonsIdeasJobsRoomsPiecesInspirePaperComposerTowersMasterpieceComposingIvoryTabletsIvory TowerSinai Author:John Zorn
“The beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer; but when the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again.” FirstsMayArtInspirationEarthLastsScienceIndividualHeavenRaceInspireExpressionMaterialsHard WorkGeniusHarmonyBreatheDestroyedWorks Of ArtComposerLiving ThingsSpecies Extinction Author:William Beebe