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JEStanek
May-07-2008, 8:48am
I get quotes e-mailed to me everyday from Quotes of the Day dot org (http://www.qotd.org/). Today is Brahms and Tchaikovsky Birthdays and I thought the quotemasters selections would be appreciated here. Enjoy. I particularly like the Stravinsky one, perhaps becuase I have so many playing failures ;)

Jamie
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I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.
- Leonard Bernstein, 1918 - 1990

Mozart is the greatest composer of all. Beethoven created his music, but the music of Mozart is of such purity and beauty that one feels he merely found it - that it has always existed as part of the inner beauty of the universe waiting to be revealed.
- Albert Einstein, 1879 - 1955

I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.
- Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky, 1882 - 1971

Study Bach: there you will find everything.
- Johannes Brahms, 1833 - 1897

A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.
- Frank Zappa, 1940 - 1993

I have been told that a young would-be composer wrote to Mozart asking advice as to how to compose a symphony. Mozart responded that a symphony was a complex and demanding form and that it would be better to start with something simpler. The young man protested, 'But Herr Mozart, you wrote symphonies when you were younger than I am now.' And Mozart replied, 'I never asked how.'
- Isaac Asimov, 1920 - 1992

MikeEdgerton
May-07-2008, 9:11am
I like the one that ends 'I never asked how.' That should be enlightening.