Charles Mingus - Arnold Schoenberg - George Gershwin - Harrison Birtwhistle - Arthur Honegger - Felix Mendelssohn - Robert Schumann - Nicolas Boileau - William Shakespeare - Samuel Johnson - Martin Amis - Thomas Hardy -
I, myself, came to enjoy the players who didn’t only just swing but who invented new rhythmic patterns, along with new melodic concepts ... I always wanted to be a spontaneous composer. I thought I was, although no one’s mentioned that. I mean critics or musicians. Now, what I’m getting at is that I know I’m a composer. I marvel at composition, at people who are able to take diatonic scales, chromatics, 12-tone scales, or even quarter-tone scales. I admire anyone who can come up with something original. But not originality alone, because there can be originality in stupidity, with no musical description of any emotion or any beauty the man has seen, or any kind of life he has lived. Charles Mingus
‘Those who compose because they want to please others and have audiences in mind are not real artists.’ Howard Goodall’s Story of Music: The Age of Tragedy, Arnold Schoenberg
The composer does not sit around and wait for an inspiration to walk up and introduce itself ... Making music is actually little else than a matter of invention aided and abetted by emotion. In composing we combine what we know of music with what we feel. George Gershwin, cited Isaac Goldberg ‘Tin Pan Alley’, 1930
You can’t stop. Composing’s not voluntary, you know. There’s no choice, you’re not free. You’re landed with an idea and you have responsibility to that idea. Harrison Birtwhistle, Observer 14th April 1996
The first requirement for a composer is to be dead. Arthur Honegger, Je Suis Compositeur, 1951
Ever since I began to compose, I have remained true to my starting principle: not to write a page because no matter what public, or what pretty girl wanted it to be thus or thus; but to write solely as I myself thought best, and as it gave me pleasure. Felix Mendelssohn
To compose music, all you have to do is remember a tune that nobody else has thought of. Robert A Schumann
Of every four words I write, I strike out three. Nicolas Boileau
Assist me some extemporal god of rime, for I am sure I shall turn sonneteer. Devise, wit; write, pen; for I am for whole volumes in folio. William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost I ii 192
Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out. Samuel Johnson, cited James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, quoting college tutor
I’m a bit of a grinder. Novels are very long, and long novels are very, very long. It’s just a hell of a lot of man-hours. I tend to just go in there, and if it comes, it comes. A morning when I write not a single word doesn’t worry me too much. If I come up against a brick wall, I’ll just go and play snooker or something or sleep on it, and my subconscious will fix it for me. Usually, it’s a journey without maps but a journey with a destination, so I know how it’s going to begin and I know how it’s going to end, but I don’t know how I’m going to get from one to the other. That, really, is the struggle of the novel. Martin Amis, 1995
How strange and god-like was a composer’s power, who from the grave could lead through sequences of emotion, which he alone had felt at first, a girl like her who had never heard of his name, and never would have a clue to his personality. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles