Quotes by Conductors

A person can grow only as much as his horizon allows.
John Powell
Life is denied by lack of attention whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece.
Nadia Boulanger
Time is a great teacher but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
Hector Berlioz
I am in the present. I cannot know what tomorrow will bring forth. I can know only what the truth is for me today. That is what I am called upon to serve.
Igor Stravinsky
The luck of having talent is not enough one must also have a talent for luck.
Hector Berlioz
The perfect computer has been developed. You just feed in your problems and they never come out again.
Al Goodman
It is one thing to be gifted and quite another thing to be worthy of one's own gift.
Nadia Boulanger
I am an arrogant and impatient listener but in the case of a few composers a very few when I hear a work I do not like I am convinced that it is my own fault. Verdi is one of those composers.
Benjamin Britten
If a literary man puts together two words about music one of them will be wrong.
Aaron Copland
Music is given to us specifically to make order of things to move from an anarchic individualistic state to a regulated perfectly concious one which alone insures vitality and durability.
Igor Stravinsky
The function of pop music is to be consumed.
Pierre Boulez
Music first and last should sound well should allure and enchant the ear. Never mind the inner significance.
Thomas Beecham
I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the varieties of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.
Igor Stravinsky
Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.
Igor Stravinsky
Throughout my career nervousness and stage-fright have never left me before playing. And each of the thousands of concerts I have played at I feel as bad as I did the very first time.
Pablo Casals
Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra not choreography to the audience.
George Szell
Jazz will endure just as long as people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.
John Philip Sousa
Nothing is better than music.... It has done more for us than we have the right to hope for.
Nadia Boulanger
The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former the music is always graver than its performance - whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being played.
Andre Previn
Let us not forget that the greatest composers were also the greatest thieves. They stole from everyone and everywhere.
Pablo Casals
God tells me how he wants the music played - and you get in his way.
Arturo Toscanini
He was dying all his life.
Hector Berlioz
It is one thing to be gifted and quite another thing to be worthy of one's own gift.
Nadia Boulanger
I am an arrogant and impatient listener but in the case of a few composers a very few when I hear a work I do not like I am convinced that it is my own fault. Verdi is one of those composers.
Benjamin Britten
If a literary man puts together two words about music one of them will be wrong.
Aaron Copland
Music is given to us specifically to make order of things to move from an anarchic individualistic state to a regulated perfectly concious one which alone insures vitality and durability.
Igor Stravinsky
The function of pop music is to be consumed.
Pierre Boulez
Music first and last should sound well should allure and enchant the ear. Never mind the inner significance.
Thomas Beecham
I know that the twelve notes in each octave and the varieties of rhythm offer me opportunities that all of human genius will never exhaust.
Igor Stravinsky
Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.
Igor Stravinsky
Throughout my career nervousness and stage-fright have never left me before playing. And each of the thousands of concerts I have played at I feel as bad as I did the very first time.
Pablo Casals
Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra not choreography to the audience.
George Szell
Jazz will endure just as long as people hear it through their feet instead of their brains.
John Philip Sousa
Nothing is better than music.... It has done more for us than we have the right to hope for.
Nadia Boulanger
The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former the music is always graver than its performance - whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being played.
Andre Previn
Let us not forget that the greatest composers were also the greatest thieves. They stole from everyone and everywhere.
Pablo Casals
God tells me how he wants the music played - and you get in his way.
Arturo Toscanini
He was dying all his life.
Hector Berlioz
When I was very young I kissed my first woman and smoked my first cigarette on the same day. Believe me never since have I wasted any more time on tobacco.
Arturo Toscanini
Ask many of us who are disabled what we would like in life and you would be surprised how few would say 'Not to be disabled.' We accept our limitations.
Itzhak Perlman
Joy is not in things it is in us.
Richard Wagner
Remember that happiness is a way of travel not a destination.
Roy Goodman
The essential conditions of everything you do must be choice love passion.
Nadia Boulanger
A person can grow only as much as his horizon allows.
John Powell
Conformism is so hot on the heels of the mass-produced avant-garde that the 'ins' and the 'outs' change places with the speed of mach 3.
Igor Stravinsky
What do we teach our children? . . . We should say to each of them: Do you know what you are? You are a marvel. You are unique . . . You may become a Shakespeare a Michelangelo a Beethoven. You have the capacity for anything.
Pablo Casals
The English may not like music but they absolutely love the noise it makes.
Thomas Beecham
I am sitting in the smallest room in my house. I have your review in front of me. Soon it will be behind me.
Max Reger
The real gift of love is self disclosure.
John Powell
Childhood - a period of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone and everything connected with it to hell.
Igor Stravinsky
The luck of having talent is not enough one must also have a talent for luck.
Hector Berlioz
To what do you attribute your advanced age? Well I suppose I must attribute it to the fact that I have not died.
Sir Malcolm Sargent
Dancing is the body made poetic.
Ernst Bacon
We are full of rhythms . . . our pulse our gestures our digestive tracts the lunar and seasonal cycles.
Yehudi Menuhin
Old age is a time of humiliations the most disagreeable of which for me is that I cannot work long at sustained high pressure with no leaks in concentration.
Igor Stravinsky
Biogeography typically trumps taxonomy and anticipates molecular phylogeny
Dennis McCarthy
I believe in the understanding of difficult situations, difficult music, or any kind of difficulties, through familiarity. Familiarity, in this case, does not breed contempt, but breeds understanding.
Daniel Barenboim
Homeopathy is the safest and more reliable approach to ailments and has withstood the assaults of established medical practice for over 100 years
Yehudi Menuhin
Parsifal is on his way to the temple of the Grail Knights and says: “I hardly move, yet far I seem to have come”, and the all-knowing Gurnemanz replies: “You see, my son, time turns here into space
Richard Wagner
I shall never be converted, and I shall remain true to my old religion of the classics until my life's end.
Richard Strauss