Composers+On+Composing

=COMPOSERS (and ARTISTS) ON COMPOSING=

Johann Goethe: “The happiest genius will hardly succeed by nature and instinct alone in rising to the sublime. Art is art; he who has not thought it out has no right to call himself an artist. Here all groping in the dark is vain; before a man can produce anything great, he must understand the means by which he is to produce it.”

Robert Schumann: "To compose music, all you have to do is remember a tune that nobody else has thought of."

Leonard Bernstein: "Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time."

Igor Stravinsky: "Too many pieces (of music) finish too long after the end."

Paul Hindemith told Norman Dello Joio, "Your music is lyrical by nature, don’t ever forget that." Dello Joio stated that, although he did not completely understand it at the time, it meant: "Don’t sacrifice necessarily to a system, go to yourself, what you hear. If it’s valid, and it’s good, put it down in your mind. Don’t say I have to do this because the system tells me to.”

Ravel: Gershwin had traveled to Paris in the hopes of studying with the great teacher Nadia Boulanger, but she refused him saying he was fine the way he was. Gershwin also sought to study with Ravel, who – upon hearing how much Gershwin made in a year – replied, "How about you give me some lessons?"

Pablo Picasso: "Inspiration exists but it has to find you working."

Igor Stravinsky: One of my favorite 20th-century composers, Igor Stravinsky, actually spoke to the subject of the benefits of parameters when composing in a series of lectures he gave during the 1939-40 academic year at Harvard University: (Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), 65-66. Stravinsky’s Poetics were first delivered in French as part of the Charles Eliot Norton lecture series during the 1939-40 academic year at Harvard University. A widely quoted English translation was made in 1947.)
 * What delivers me from the anguish into which an unrestricted freedom plunges me is the fact that I am always able to turn immediately to the concrete things that are here in question…in art as in everything else, one can build only upon a resisting foundation: whatever constantly gives way to pressure, constantly renders movement impossible. My freedom thus consists in my moving about within the narrow frame that I have assigned myself for each one of my undertakings.
 * I shall go even further: my freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint, diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self…and the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.