Composers From The United States

"I can’t think of anyone more suited for Eurovision. She’s an LGBT artist, an absolute live performance beast, she’s drop-dead gorgeous, and her ever-changing genre-defying music would totally speak to all sub-fandoms. She’s made of the same material as Eurovision winners."

"You've got to know your power"

"It's midnight in Vegas And oh, I want to be famous And oh, I'm willing to get it just right for you That's why I'm spread on the bed tonight I'm feeling so dead inside"

"I have to know what I'm doing I don't know what I'm doing Not gonna lie to you No idea what I'm doing right now"

"He don’t know how the devil comes Right out under the midday sun How he hungers for a way to make control How he’d throw my body down How I’ll never make a sound How he’s waiting around the corner"

"The rules I want to break The games I love to play I know I shouldn't say It's burning up my time"

"I make a lot of bad decisions"

"We come together Baby, can you feel it? We're all torn up inside"

""We’re all living double lives: There’s the skin we wear on the surface, and then the one we keep to ourselves – the part of us that indulges in curiosities and fantasies we wouldn’t dare admit to the world, let alone ourselves."

"Music is like food. It is necessary for me to stay alive. It is a fundamental part of being a human being. It is sustenance, full of different flavors, full of culture and beauty... I also just really love food, so, this is my analogy, I guess."

"I enjoy strategizing and planning releases as packages, not just throwing them out willy nilly. But honestly, in today's music culture, every form of expression becomes valid if you give it your authentic effort."

"Hot take: this is probably not the first time it’s Rapist v. Rapist for president"

"Men will tell you what you are From the day you are born ‘til the day when your heart stops beating They give you their names"

"They call, they call me the fat man 'Cause I weight two hundred pounds All the girls they love me 'Cause I know my way around."

"Now there's no point in placing the blame And you should know I'd suffer the same"

"You made me cry, when you said goodbye Ain't that a shame My tears fell like rain Ain't that a shame You're the one to blame"

"…I think if you want to make a recipe for making a writer, have them feel a little out of place everywhere, have them be an observer kind of all the time, and that's a great way to make a writer…"

"I remember a young playwright of Puerto Rican descent named Lin-Manuel Miranda, who told us in the photo line before an evening of poetry, music, and the spoken word that he planned to debut the first song of what he hoped would be a hip-hop musical on the life of America's first Treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton. We were politely encouraging but secretly skeptical, until he got up onstage and started dropping beats and the audience went absolutely nuts."

"The honest answer is there are things inside me I want to make – Hamilton is one of those things, Heights was another. And since the success of Hamilton, my life has been about finding the balance between the things I always wanted to make and the opportunities that are so incredible I’d be angry if they opened and I wasn’t in them. So Mary Poppins and Little Mermaid definitely fall into that category. I think there is always a part of me that is checking in with childhood Lin and asking: ‘Would little Lin be freaking out about this?’ If the answer is yes, then I say yes."

"I hear a chavalo named Lin-Manuel in New York is pretty good."

"(Which writers — novelists, playwrights, critics, journalists, poets — working today do you admire most?) …Also Lin-Manuel Miranda; “Hamilton” blew me away, and I can’t wait to see what he does next."

"There are a few people who only like hip-hop music, and a few who only like theatre music, and the rest of us just like good shit. It doesn’t matter what form it comes in. I think we’re all a lot more eclectic than we give ourselves credit for…"

"I think that if we’ve done our job well and we articulate this individual’s life well, the themes inherent in that translate…It’s about legacy, about how much do we do with the time we’re given? And then there are themes that wrestle with the American character, but only in that Hamilton’s life is a rough-draft version of the arguments we still have as a country."

"…Hip-hop is an instant gratification, winners and losers circle, and often those who are losing give up after three or four, five years. I’m probably trendier now as a 42-year-old than I’ve ever been…"

"Dare I hesitate to say that creativity might be in jeopardy because one of the key components of being creative is boredom and silence and isolation."

"A lot of us are afraid that we’ll get found out as normal. The reason why bodyguards and velvet ropes really exist is mainly because a lot of celebrities don’t want you to know how normal and regular they are…"

"I still don’t know if I am truly creative...At times I feel like I’m a way better student than I am teacher or maker."

"I jumped in the river and there’s piranhas and sharks, but I have a 500-foot lead on them."

"When I was 8, my best friend was raped and murdered and thrown off the roof of our building. That's when my serious writing began--when writing became an outlet for me to express my feelings and emotions…That is when I began to understand the power of writing. Other kids played stickball; I'd write weird journal entries."

"Respect your history, listen to your ancestors, tell the truth, and write your own story—or someone else will write it and get it all wrong."

"I think the audience I'd like to reach is increasingly an audience that stays home--a poor audience, a Latino audience, people of color, or people who feel disenfranchised. They're not going out and they don't feel entitled to theater. Theater is becoming more and more elitist because we just do it for each other. It seems that there are more theater people at the theater than regular people, and that's not good."

"I wanted to write a play about racism, about poverty, about the negative forces that haunt us and make us murderous—and the positive forces that do daily battle for us—like love, friendship, family—which lead to some kind of hope..."

"I think the main thing I do every show, and I guess most performers do this, is engaging the audience, but I like to engage the audience in a very direct way right off the bat by starting the show with giving them the choice to participate or not because that’s the choice. By choosing to participate or not, you’re participating. Do you know what I mean? And I can figure out what their level of participation’s going to be and where I can go into crowd."

"I like visiting a lot of places, but I always am like, I’m just so glad I live in Baltimore. It’s like the perfect size city where it is a city and it’s large, but it’s also small enough where you can really feel like a part of a scene and a part of a community."

"I got out of my record deal just so I could connect two cultures together."

"We figured out that these singers go to specific studios to record in Bollywood all the time. So if you’re a studio engineer, you see these singers on a daily basis. We reached out to the studio, pretending to have a lot of money, pretending to have a project coming in from Hollywood and saying we’d like to record with them, but we want this singer."

"When I'm watching a scary movie and there's a shadow or a flicker under the bed, that's scary because the unknown is so much scarier than when, two-thirds of the way through the movie, it's revealed that it's a guy in a mask. Once it becomes tangible and fixed in your mind's eye, it becomes a lot less scary to me and I think music is the same way. If you don't recognize that sound, your brain immediately tells you to run away. It's the shark fin in the water, it's hearing the music and then maybe you see a fin, it's all about the build up to the 'boo' itself and that has been my entire philosophy about horror music from the beginning – how unrecognizable is it going to be?"

"I think any composer is the sum of their life experience, and that's what makes each of them interesting and different."

"My favorite aspect about horror music is you can literally write anything you want. You are limited only by your imagination! In fact, many times the more unique and completely original your music is, the better it works in the game and the more the developer loves it."

"I am invisible, he thinks often. And Exempt. Immunity has been granted me, for I don ot lose my cool. Polarity is selected at will, for I am not ionized and I possess not valence. Call me inert and featureless but Beware, I am the Shadow, free to could men's minds. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? I am the Dracula, look into my eye."

"Every challenge along the way With courage I will face I will battle every day To claim my rightful place Come with me, the time is right There's no better team Arm in arm we'll win the fight It's always been our dream"

"I wanna be the very best Like no one ever was"

"This woman was Cathy Berberian, a personality in her own right, an artist of the rarest kind and a splendid singer to boot. Everything she did bore the hallmarks of authenticity. Whether it was early music (Monteverdi) or contemporary works (Berio, Kurt Weill and Stravinsky), everything rang true. And as for Debussy, I don't think anyone could sing him better. She has a way with Sprechgesang that won me over completely. She's a mistress of metamorphosis, a female chameleon. At the time of her concert, she was suffering from a dreadful cold, but it didn't stop her from singing for a moment. Mastery and total freedom. And the wit that she brought to her impersonations! And the way the danced the Azerbaijani song, as well as the Offenbach and Gershwin! What a phenomenal talent!"

"I tend to overplay—I play too hard because I've felt competitive in a room a lot of times with guys as a player, so I'd just play really dynamically."

"Horror has many iterations, many shades. Landing the perfect balance of melody, texture and sonics is the key to a great score. Some horror films require a huge, aggressive palette. Others are the complete opposite. Finding that musical happy place is what will make the movie from a score perspective."

"Composing a score is like getting in one of those mini-submarines that take you to the bottom of the ocean. You crawl into this little bubble, seal yourself away from the outside world and dive deep into uncharted territory. Sometimes the places you explore are dark, sometimes they’re light. If you have the right tools and knowledge you can explore wherever you like and have a great experience. It’s a crude analogy to genre hopping, but it’s accurate. I was lucky as a kid to be exposed to so much different material. I watched cartoons and read all kinds of comics as much as I buried my head in scary stuff. It makes going from talking animals one day to shape-shifters the next pretty easy. Truth is, most composers are pinballs. They can bounce around from style to style and adapt really well."

"I don't think that Anne or I had any concept that we were unusual to have this idea to go straight for The Beatles-type thing. So, completely without a sexual reference involved, just strode in the door and made a band, or two, or three."

"A lot of women play guitar very respectfully, and they play with the guitar; they don't play it—they play with it."

"Games run primarily on music loops. Each piece is composed to cycle during gameplay so it’s important to create music that doesn’t get monotonous or annoying and has very exact pacing. The use of themes, signature motifs and rhythmic passages needs to be arranged so they remain effective when played over and over. In a film, it’s a one-time-through experience. Tracks are scored tightly to picture and each track is crafted to exactly match what’s going on on-screen. Scoring in such a precise manner wouldn’t be practical in games because of the dynamic environment of gameplay. It can be different each time you revisit a level or area of a game, whereas a film is intended to play one way every time."

"My background in music came from me playing drums and piano as a young child. My grandmother was a pianist and I was influenced by her and my parents were playing rock records which influenced my drumming. I was a fan of film scores, rock, classical, jazz, and hip-hop in my early years and tried to learn as much about each of those genres as possible. I began writing music in a serious way in my teen years while I was playing in various bands and orchestras."