composition quotes

Pictures must not be too picturesque.

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

Objects in pictures should so be arranged as by their very position to tell their own story.

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

I have found that, in the composition of the human body as compared with the bodies of animals, the organs of sense are duller and coarser. Thus, it is composed of less ingenious instruments, and of spaces less capacious for receiving the faculties of sense.

Tones sound, and roar and storm about me until I have set them down in notes.

Those Dutchmen had hardly any imagination or fantasy, but their good taste and their scientific knowledge of composition were enormous.

Classical – perhaps I should say ‚orchestral‘ – music is so digital, so cut up, rhythmically, pitchwise and in terms of the roles of the musicians. It’s all in little boxes. The reason you get child prodigies in chess, arithmetic, and classical composition is that they are all worlds of discontinuous, parceled-up possibilities.