I spoke French a bit, and I could speak a bit of this and that, and when you were taught those things by people who couldn't really do it, you can do some pretty wonderfully, imaginative horrific things to teachers.
How absurd these critics must seem to me, who in their modern wantonness have become so ingenious. They want to interpret my Tannhauser as specifically Christian and impute to him a tendency to impotent glorification!
What I don't like is taking it to extremes and making all these intellectualizations about what basically is simple music. It's simple stream-of-consciousness stuff in my songs. What I'm trying to get across is misinterpreted.
It's hard to make music knowing that it's not going to be received by the listener in the way that it should be.
The music I was making for people not to dance to was the one they were dancing to.
There's nothing comparative to Damien [the current Robin] or any of the other characters. I love those characters. And this isn't, "This is better than that." I think a couple of people misread what we had said in the first issue about that stuff.
Weaknesses in men of genius are usually an exaggeration of their personal feeling; in the hands of feeble imitators they become the most flagrant blunders. Entire schools have been founded on misinterpretations of certain aspects of the masters. Lamentable mistakes have resulted from the thoughtless enthusiasm with which men have sought inspiration from the worst qualities of remarkable artists because they are unable to reproduce the sublime elements in their work.
I think other people's interpretations of what I've written are a lot better than what I have, because I don't understand a lot of what I write.
Those who attempts to explain a picture are on the wrong track most of the time.
Novelists are always resisting autobiographical readings of their work, because they know how false those can be.
A lot of times you get credit for stuff in your movies you didn't intend to be there.
Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings.
I am relatively familiar with getting a good old rumping from the critics. In some cases, the critics just didn't like the film - fair cop. Others, I think, didn't understand it.
The problem was the journalists who also did not understand much of my music, but they wrote about it. I think you fell into the usual trap laid out by parts of the press and other writers: that the poor musician has always to fight the evil companies and managers.
There's nothing worse than the frustration of having somebody who you feel doesn't get what you're doing, trying to turn it into something else. It's a very, very annoying and sort of frustrating thing and I just never wanted to go through it. I was very fortunate as I came up through the film business that I was able to insulate myself from that.
The very best thing for music would be to live next door to a person who listens to loud music so you could mishear music everyday and mutate it to your own means.
composition is notation of distortion of what composers think they've heard before. Masterpieces are marvelous misquotations.
