Symphony Quotes - Page 10

• On one hand you have a string quartet, which is not a symphony. On the other hand is you have me sampling them and making it sound like there is many more people playing, so the whole notion of, kind of, sampling applied to classical music is very intriguing to me because composers throughout history have borrowed motifs and quotes from one another.

  DJ Spooky

  Hands, People, Sound

  Source: bigthink.com

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• What I'm going for with the string arrangements for my Antarctic symphony is a pun here.

  DJ Spooky

  Strings, Pun, Arrangements

  Source: bigthink.com

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• The alarm in the morning? Well, I have an old tape of Carlo Maria Giulini conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in a perfectly transcendent version in Shubert's seventh symphony. And I've rigged it up so that at exactly 7:30 every morning it falls from the ceiling onto my face.

  Stephen Fry

  Morning, Fall, Alarms

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• Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be vulgarity - like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day.

  C. S. Lewis

  Would Be, Asking, Repetition

  C.S. Lewis (1996). “Perelandra”, p.38, Simon and Schuster

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• My symphonies would have reached Opus 100 if I had but written them down... Sometimes I am so full of music, and so overflowing with melody, that I find it simply impossible to write down anything.

  Robert Schumann

  Writing, Impossible, Sometimes

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• It took me the bulk of my twenties to write one book about a family of alligator wrestlers. Whereas somebody like Steve Martin is releasing his latest banjo symphony, having just completed another movie and acclaimed, best-selling novel.

  Karen Russell

  Book, Writing, Twenties

  "The Exchange: Karen Russell on 'Swamplandia!'" by Rachel Hurn, www.newyorker.com. February 15, 2011.

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• I think my first impression (of Bix Beiderbecke) was the lasting one. I remember very clearly thinking, 'Where, what planet, did this guy come from? Is he from outer space?' I'd never heard anything like the way he played-not in Chicago, no place. The tone-he had this wonderful, ringing cornet tone. He could have played in a symphony orchestra with that tone. But also the intervals he played, the figures-whatever the hell he did. There was a refinement about his playing. You know, in those days I played a little trumpet, and I could play all the solos from his records, by heart.

  Benny Goodman

  Heart, Thinking, Play

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• When I was very young, I remember my mother telling me about a friend of hers in Germany, a pianist who played a symphony that wasn't permitted, and the Germans came up on stage and broke every finger on her hands. I grew up with stories of Nazis breaking the fingers of Jews.

  Steven Spielberg

  Mother, Hands, Germany

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• It's a fundamental, social attitude that the 1% supports symphonies and operas and doesn't support Johnny learning to program hip-hop beats. When I put it like that, it sounds like, 'Well, yeah,' but you start to think, 'Why not, though?' What makes one more valuable than another?

  David Byrne

  Attitude, Thinking, Support

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• When I was 20, Shostakovich was my favorite composer. I still find his Fifth Symphony wonderful, with its outstanding themes and rhythms. That's the piece that made me want to be a classical composer.

  Dave Brubeck

  Want, Pieces, Wonderful

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• When I auditioned actors I never make them act. I choose a long symphony, then I tell them to sit down and I play the symphony for them. Then I sit and I look at them. I always pick a piece of music that has up and downs, very dramatic parts, very quiet parts and really sensitive parts so that it can produce different emotions.

  Pirjo Honkasalo

  Play, Long, Different

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• Actors want to work with you but they want you to do their thing. Actors, whom I love with a blind partiality, sometimes they want to be soloists in the symphony, not a part of the orchestra.

  James Gray

  Actors, Orchestra, Want

  Source: www.movieweb.com

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• What a director does... essentially, it's storytelling, but a director also controls the feeling and the sounds and the texture. It's an act of creation, like a symphony or a painting or a story. But with different tools.

  John Carpenter

  Feelings, Sound, Directors

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• Conversation never sits easier upon us than when we now and then discharge ourselves in a symphony of laughter, which may not improperly be called the chorus of conversation.

  Richard Steele

  Laughter, May, Now And Then

  Sir Richard Steele, Joseph Addison (1822). “The Guardian”, p.116

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• A man must pay the fiddler. In my case it so happened that a whole symphony orchestra often had to be subsidized.

  John Barrymore

  Men, Orchestra, Pay

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• The West has given the world the symphony, and the novel.

  Ibn Warraq

  World, West, Given

  Ibn Warraq (2013). “Why the West is Best: A Muslim Apostate's Defense of Liberal Democracy”, p.17, Encounter Books

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• My whole family is in the arts some way or the other. My father was a cellist in a symphony outside Chicago that was a side-job, he was a scientist. My mother was a dancer in New York. She was next-door neighbors with Dorothy Loudon and they moved to New York together. Mom was a dancer in New York for several years before she got married. My sister was a classical pianist. And my brother was a partier. So it all just seemed to work.

  Jason Graae

  Mom, Mother, Brother

  Source: www.broadwayworld.com

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• Women play cellos and violins in symphony orchestras. They're playing Beethoven and Bach. What do you mean they can't play rock and roll?

  Joan Jett

  Mean, Rocks, Rock And Roll

  "Joan Jett Rumbles Back with 'Sinner'". "Day To Day" with Noah Adams, www.npr.org. July 26, 2006.

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• Every time I open the paper, there's some symphony orchestra collapsing somewhere in the United States. What the hell is going on? And then you find out that the board members try to run these things as businesses.

  Brice Marden

  Running, Trying, United States

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I never listen to music when I am writing. It would be impossible. I listen to Bach in the mornings, mostly choral music; also some Handel, mostly songs and arias; I like Schubert's and Beethoven's chamber music and Sibelius' symphonies; for opera, I listen to Mozart and in recent years Wagner.

  Colm Toibin

  Song, Morning, Writing

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• Whatever I do today is the whole continuum of my experience. Like John Dewey said in his book ‘Art as Experience,’ you can’t separate experience from the work of art. So, if I write for the symphony today, you’re listening to everything that’s happened to me since I was 18 years old.

  Yusef Lateef

  Art, Book, Writing

  Yusef Lateef, Herb Boyd (2006). “The Gentle Giant: The Autobiography of Yusef Lateef”, p.176, morton books, inc

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• Anton Bruckner wrote the same symphony nine times, trying to get it just right. He failed.

  Edward Abbey

  Musical, Trying, Nine

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.41, RosettaBooks

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• For an instant God opens his door and His orchestra plays the Fifth Symphony.

  Jean Sibelius

  Doors, Play, Orchestra

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• Faust, the Ninth Symphony, and the will of Adolf Hitler are eternal youth and know neither time nor transience.

  Baldur von Schirach

  Youth, Faust, Eternal

  "The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership". Book by Joachim C. Fest , p. 221, 1999.

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• If a young man at the age of twenty-three can write a symphony like that, in five years he will be ready to commit murder.

  Walter Damrosch

  Writing, Men, Years

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