Musical Translation Quotes

Musicals are written in English, and then we import them to Japan. When we translate them into Japanese, the sounds of the language are completely different. The Japanese language is not the best for singing, in terms of sound.

When I'm making a new ballet, I usually read through the score a little bit, and then I have to go back and translate or transcribe all the counts for dancers because the way that you hear it is completely different from the way the musicians read and play it.

The thing I love about music is, if you do it long enough, you get better and better at translating what's in your head to a medium. That's why I keep doing it.

It is impossible to translate poetry. Can you translate music?

For me, the most difficult thing is that I am learning melodies on guitar from some songs whose melodies were not meant to be played on guitar. Ever. They were intended mostly for keyboards or melodic percussion.

What makes something pop? It's really just the bed it's placed in. If I grab melodies by Black Sabbath or Metallica and take them out of their musical bed and put them into a pop context, it's not like they wouldn't translate.

Ornette Coleman is a real musician. He takes all of the things he's thinking about in the world - which is a whole universe upon universe - and translates this into music.

I'm not a salsa singer who wants to sing in English, and I'm not this American kid who wants to sing Spanish.

[Patrick Leonard] is such a magnificent composer. I don't think there is anybody working today with those kind of skills that could translate one of my tunes into that really beautiful chamber music.

The musician - if he be a good one - finds his own perception prompted by the poet's perception, and he translates the expression of that perception from the terms of poetry into the terms of music.

I think music is another language.

I think any musical has so many moving parts and the challenge is unifying all the moving parts in particular because you have the camera and now it's all about adaptation and what works in one medium doesn't necessarily work in another so the challenge is to stay as true as you can to the material and yet not be afraid to step out of it and add elements to make it satisfying cinematically.

An idea that will translate really well musically should work visually. I try to write music that you can feel if you were to close your eyes you can see what I am talking about.

With vocal and choral music, first and foremost, it's the text. Not only do I need to serve the text, but the text - when I'm doing it right - acts as the perfect 'blueprint', and all the architecture is there. The poet has done the heavy lifting, so my job is to find the soul of the poem and then somehow translate that into music.