Quotes by Conductors - Page 2

I used to think that eighty was a very old age. Now I am ninety. I do not think this any more. As long as you are able to admire and to love, you are young.
Pablo Casals
One lives by memory . . . and not by truth.
Igor Stravinsky
He was a six and a half foot scowl.(on Rachmaninov)
Igor Stravinsky
The world is in A major...the earth revolves in A major, a low A.
Thomas Ades
The Prince stood beside the timpanist to count his rests for him and see that he came in in the right place. I suppressed all the trumpet passages which were clearly beyond the players' grasp. The solitary trombone was left to his own devices; but as he wisely confined himself to the notes with which he was thoroughly familiar, such as A flat, D and F, and was careful to avoid all others, his success in the role was almost entirely a silent one.
Hector Berlioz
The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another…and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.”—
Leonard Bernstein
I cannot now evaluate the events that, at the end of those thirty years, made me discover the necessity of religious belief. I was not reasoned into my disposition. Though I admire the structured thought of theology, it is to religion no more than counterpoint exercises are to music.
Igor Stravinsky
It's good to vandalize one's own work.
John P. Sousa
Hitherto I had been convinced that my friend wanted to become an artist, a painter, or perhaps an architect. Now this was no longer the case. Now he aspired to something higher, which I could not yet fully grasp. It rather surprised me, as I thought that the vocation of the artist was for him the highest, most desirable goal. But now he was talking of a mandate which, one day, he would receive from the people, to lead them out of servitude to the heights of freedom.It was an unknown youth who spoke to me in that strange hour. He spoke of a special mission which one day would be entrusted to him, and I, his only listener, could hardly understand what he meant. Many years had to pass before I realized the significance of this enraptured hour for my friend.
August Kubizek
Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.
Gustav Mahler
I have seen the greatest artists and the most eccentric divas in music. The greater and more visionary they were, the more self-reflexive and childlike they behaved.
Christian Gansch
(From Boulez, an authorized biography by Joan Peyser)At the chapel door he [a priest associated with a school Boulez attended] asked me if what he had been told was true: that Boulez no longer believed in God. I said it was...
Pierre Boulez
A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future.
Leonard Bernstein
Always remember your days are blessed. You may know how to profit from them or you may not, but they are blessed.
Nadia Boulanger
Most of us plateau when we lose the tension between where we are and where we ought to be.
John Gardiner
We must be trying to learn who we really are rather than trying to tell ourselves who we should be.
John Powell
...imagine anybody having lived forty-five or fifty years without knowing Hamlet! One might as well spend one's life in a coal mine.
Hector Berlioz
Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes.
Aaron Copland
It was not sympathy in the ordinary sense which he [Adolf Hitler] felt for the disinherited. That would not have been sufficient. He not only suffered with them, he lived for them and devoted all his thoughts to the salvation of those people from distress and poverty... his noble and grandiose work, which was intended 'for everybody'...
August Kubizek
So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning.
Aaron Copland
Loneliness is the prison of the human spirit. When we are lonely, we pace back and forth in small, shut-in worlds.
John Powell
In music, in the sea, in a flower, in a leaf, in an act of kindness... I see what people call God in all these things.
Pablo Casals
I feel the capacity to care is the thing which gives life its deepest significance.
Pablo Casals
To live fully, we must learn to use things and love people, and not love things and use people.
John Powell
The gift of imagination is by no means an exclusive property of the artist; it is a gift we all share; to some degree or other all of us are endowed with the powers of fantasy, the dullest of dullards among us has the gift of dreams at night - visions and yearnings and hopes. Everyone can also think; it is the quality thought that makes the difference - not just the quality of logical thinking, but of imaginative thinking. And our greatest thinkers, those who have radically changed our world, have always arrived at their truths by dreaming them; they are first fantasized, and only then subjected to proof.
Leonard Bernstein
❝Learn everything you can, anytime you can, from anyone you can; there will always come a time when you will be grateful you did.❞
Sarah Caldwell
I can't see the logic in medicating a grieving person like there was something wrong with her, and yet it happens all the time... you go to the doctor with symptoms of profound grief and they push an antidepressant at you. We need to walk through our grief, not medicate it and shove it under the carpet like it wasn't there.
Richard Wagner
This has been my vocation to make music of what remains.
Itzhak Perlman
Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time... The wait is simply too long.
Leonard Bernstein
I've been all over the world and I've never seen a statue of a critic.
Leonard Bernstein
Sorrowful and great is the artist's destiny.
Franz Liszt
The fully human person is in deep and meaningful contact with the world outside of him. He not only listens to himself, but to the voices of the world. The breadth of his own individual experience is infinitely multiplied through a sensitive empathy with others. He suffers with the suffering, rejoices with the joyful. He is born again in every springtime, feels the impact of the great mysteries of life: birth, growth, love, suffering, death. His heart skips along with the 'young lovers', and he knows something of the exhilaration that is in them. He also knows the ghetto's philosophy of despair, the loneliness of suffering without relief, and the bell never tolls without tolling in some strange way for him.
John Powell
How often do we stand convinced of the truth of our early memories, forgetting that they are assessments made by a child? We can replace the narratives that hold us back by inventing wiser stories, free from childish fears, and, in doing so, disperse long-held psychological stumbling blocks.
Benjamin Zander
I'm no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is Yes.
Leonard Bernstein
Life when one first arrives is a continual mortification as one's romantic illusions are successively shattered and the musical treasure-house of one's imagination crumbles before the hopelessness of the reality. Every day fresh experiences bring fresh disappointments.
Hector Berlioz
This is reality, back home is routine.
George Ikilikjan
...the player who looks least engaged may be the most committed member of the group. A cynic, after all, is a passionate person who does not want to be disappointed again.
Benjamin Zander
Right. So if the eyes are shining, you know you're doing it. If the eyes are not shining, you get to ask a question. And this is the question: who am I being that my players' eyes are not shining? We can do that with our children, too. Who am I being, that my children's eyes are not shining? That's a totally different world.
Benjamin Zander
I have a definition of success. For me, it's very simple. It's not about wealth and fame and power. It's about how many shining eyes I have around me.
Benjamin Zander
Music embodies feeling without forcing it to contend and combine with thought, as it is forced in most arts and especially in the art of words.
Franz Liszt
Plenty of masterpieces are just one cliché after another, Mozart for example, but that's quite natural, because if you think about it, two clichés that have never met each other before can beget the most original and profound effect.
Thomas Ades
Music is the final piece of filmmaking—the essential element that pulls emotion from an audience and puts the goosebumps on the screen.
Artie Kane
Music is either good or it isn’t, it’s not someone’s opinion.
Toscanini
Brahms' Variations are better than mine, but mine were written before his.
Franz Liszt
With the new technology that keeps entering the media, film composers are constantly being placed in new learning situations. Acknowledging this and realizing that one must keep up, I maintain, nonetheless, that the real creative power is in the mind and heart of the composer.
Henry Mancini
Our musicians in residence carry this belief into the classroom. They don't think of children's self-esteem as so fragile that it will be shattered by the suggestion that the child guessed wrong or jumped to an invalid conclusion. They make corrections matter-of-factly, with no feeling that a chid is a failure because she has made an error, but with ocnfidence that the feedback will help the child learn and be accurate the next time.
Peter Perret
The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, 'Is there a meaning to music?' My answer would be, 'Yes.' And 'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?' My answer to that would be, 'No'.
Aaron Copland
Music without the ebb and flow would be like "watching a film with only good guys in it." -attrib Frank Zappa
John Powell
Jazz will endure as long as people hear it through their feet instead of their brains
John Philip Sousa
People usually complain that music is so ambiguous, and what they are supposed to think when they hear it is so unclear, while words are understood by everyone. But for me it is exactly the opposite...what the music I love expresses to me are thoughts not to indefinite for words, but rather too definite.
Felix Mendelssohn
The new kind of music seems to create not from the heart but from the head. Its composers think rather than feel. They have not the capacity to make their works exalt - they meditate, protest, analyze, reason, calculate and brood, but they do not exalt.
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Music is the heart of life." She speaks love; "without it, there is no possible good and with it everything is beautiful.
Franz Liszt
Music, of all the arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning ... except its own.
Leonard Bernstein
It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature and everlasting beauty of monotony.
Benjamin Britten
Any good music must be an innovation.
Les Baxter
I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.
Igor Stravinsky
The artist must forget the audience, forget the critics, forget the technique, forget everything but love for the music.Then, the music speaks through the performance,and the performer and the listener will walk togetherwith the soul of the composer, and withGod.
Mstislav Rostropovich
This will be our reply to violence:to make music more intensely,more beautifully,more devotedly than ever before.
Leonard Bernstein
To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself, incredible and inconceivable.
Aaron Copland
A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence.
Leopold Stokowski