Anne Dudley Quotes (23 Quotes)

There's a great difference between having 20 in an orchestra and having 70 in an orchestra. Seventy is a big sound, a symphony orchestra sort of size, and 20 is a lot more intimate, and you can hear a lot more of the individual instruments rather than the wash of symphonic sound. It depends on what you want to do.

I had actually always wanted to be a film composer, but when I was at college there didn't seem to be any easy route into it-or any route into it at all. I found myself in this pop world and arranging things for people and dealing with orchestras and string sections, and I suppose I thought I ought to be doing this myself.

I'm very interested in the color of sound. And I'm very interested in the juxtaposition of different things, ethnic instruments juxtaposed with symphonic instruments, and I'm interested in the ancient and the modern. I don't know why, but it has always been something that's fascinated me, from when I first heard a symphony orchestra I wanted to know how those sounds were made.

Film scores are often based on short themes, and it helps if you've got some way of developing these themes and making them sometimes last 4 minutes and sometimes last 40 seconds. One ends up doing it subconsciously.

I think being studio-literate helps, because obviously I'm not intimidated by the studio, and I never have been. I've always thought it was another part of the creative process.

The greatest thing you can have when you compose a film score is a bit of time to think before you have to charge straight in and do it.

I think that music has an endless life.

I think the thing about being a film composer is that you have to be pretty eclectic-be able to turn your hand to all sorts of different styles and genres and be familiar with the latest rhythms and the range of an obscure instrument.

You know, nobody eats in England. Three or four pints of English beer a night fills you. I can't say I'm very impressed with the food in America. it's all sort of bland. Like turkey sandwiches.

It's really the sound of the voices, the sound of the words, the sound of the sound that we're interested in.

Usually one or two things happen: Either you have an idea straightaway - the sort of sound that you want or the instrumentation or one particular sound that you want to feature - or you don't.

I like to start at the beginning and make the music develop in line with the drama developing. I've talked to other composers about this, and they don't all do it this way. Some people like to find the emotional center of it and work from the climax and t

Composers are always going back to the past.

My favorite work is The Full Monty because I got an Oscar for it. But it was really hard work at the time. Sometimes comedy is not a bundle of laughs to actually do.

The Art of Noise was in this suspended animation. We never really went away. But I think it was quite an ecologically sound move not to release anything for about nine years, because there's far too much stuff out there anyway. Until we thought we had something really good, we didn't want to burden the world with more stuff.

I prefer to see a rough cut of the film rather than read a script. I find it difficult to get the feeling of the atmosphere of a film from a script.

Sometimes in films it's nice to have violins on either side, rather than on one side, so you've got more of a stereo picture with the violins. Sometimes it's good to have the basses in the middle.

We all shared an admiration of Debussy both as a musician and as sort of an icon for the 20th century. It seemed like an interesting idea to go right back 100 years to find the source of some new ideas now.

I wanted to do something that had a purely musical inspiration, and I was inspired by the sound of choirs and the English pastoral music I used to hear when growing up. I was also inspired by the textures and rhythmic vitality of the so-called minimalists, Philip Glass and John Adams, and I'm always intrigued by the sound of the recording studio.

I always think it's important to choose your initial theme very carefully because you're going to be married to it for a long time. You might have to generate an hour's worth of music from a very short, little piece of theme.

It was only ironically by being in the Art of Noise that people started being interested in me to do film scores.

Obviously in Art of Noise, I'm just part of the group, and when I do film scores, it's always in collaboration with the director and other people involved.

I wanted to make a classical piece that was actually designed to be a CD, not designed for performance.