Composition Process Quotes

When I write the music for any of my songs, I write as a composer-lyricist in my head.

On 'PG-13,' the way I wrote that is that I would get my tracks ahead of time and then I would write for them, and I wrote fairly quickly.

Writers write. That's all it is. It is as simple, and as complex, as that.

Writing a simple melody can take weeks to get it right where I want it, but I do quite enjoy it.

I find it very difficult to compose when I'm not playing.

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.

Usually composers need a reason to write. I need a deadline.

Being honest and spontaneous is important when making music. But I'm also really logical when I compose.

I've written arrangements for choirs and strings in the past, but I usually write music with my voice or a keyboard and then I'll get someone who is good at writing scores to write it out. Or, if I have the luxury of time, I will go in a room and hear the people perform and then change it through what I hear, not on paper. I can read music OK, but I probably rebelled a little - music changes into something else when you read it.

This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated, if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it.

There's an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing music, into searching for notes and pieces of musical information that don't exist.

I consider everything I compose a gift.

Nothing convinces an artist more of the arbitrariness of the means to which he resorts to attain a goal - however permanent it may be - than the creative process itself, the process of composition.

I had always been more interested in playing and improvising than sitting down at a desk and writing out a piece. I'd always found it more fun to play, and the other a little bit tedious. I always had trouble with the decisions.

The way to compose for me is to have lots of time.

I've always been able to just concoct a melody quite easily - it's just kind of instinct, really. You've got to channel your subconscious.

I like to come up with the melodies, and I have a lot of ideas as far as structure goes.

I'll just start laying out the melody exactly where I want it to fall. And then I'll go back and fill it out. Whereas, in other pieces I'm really just going a couple bars at a time.

Here is how I work: when I think that a film needs to have a principal theme, I search for a melody. I have a very strange melodic gift: melodies come to me effortlessly. So I write melodies-thirty, forty, fifty-then I cast them off until I have just two or three. If only one is needed, I go see the director and ask him to decide. That happened one time with Jacques Demy for the duo of the twins [in Les demoiselles de Rochefort]: I went to his house in Noirmoutier to play 35 possible themes for him.

In order to compose, all you need to do is remember a tune that nobody else has thought of.

Once a composition is complete I sing the track and send it to the director. He sometimes suggests I record them in my voice, and I go ahead.

The composition of a single melody is born out of a bit of text, perhaps the first line, but it can also be the entire strophe; it can even be the poem's overall form.

I just scribbled away and eventually a C-major chord was there. I didn't ever decide I was going to be a composer. It was like being tall. It's what I was. It's what I did.

I don't really focus on if what I'm writing is pop or not. I just write music and then I try to figure out how to arrange the things that I write.

Every time I sit down in front of my piano, I like to improvise with the instrument. It depends on my mood of that day what kind of melodies and rhythms I am playing around. Sometimes, even before starting to play I already have a quite clear picture of a song I would like to compose, or at least the sound of it.