Symphony Quotes - Page 5

• To me it's no accident that all the symphony orchestras around the world tune up to the note A. And A is 440 cycles, except in Germany where it's 444. But the universe is 450 cycles. So what I'm trying to say is, I think it's God's voice, melody especially. Counterpoint, retrograde inversion, harmony... that's the science and the craft.

  Quincy Jones

  Thinking, Voice, Trying

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• The joy of working with the Chicago Symphony was immeasureable.

  Georg Solti

  Joy, Chicago

  Georg Solti, Harvey Sachs (1997). “Memoirs”, Knopf

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• I love Gustavo Dudamel and I love what he does for classical music, and I love what he comes out of, El Sistema and the old man Abreu. When we were in Venezuela, I had the chance to go to his building. He had, like, five or six orchestras playing of kids from the hood playing, like, Mahler's third symphony and Shostakovich fifth and Beethoven. Man, it's unbelievable. I mean, they could play.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Kids, Mean, Men

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• As a young composer I had a particular fondness for Liszt's Beethoven Symphony arrangements for the piano, and to this day I enjoy playing non-piano music at the piano.

  Michael Hersch

  Piano, Young, Enjoy

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• Every couple weeks I'll listen to Sibelius's Seventh Symphony, just to check in, to see how it's doing. It's doing OK.

  Nico Muhly

  Couple, Week, Checks

  Interview with Sean Michaels, believermag.com. October 1, 2008.

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• He wanted us to play whatever we played in the most characteristic and appropriate style. Even it was the theme from 'The Godfather,' you needed to play that then the way that a Hollywood producer would expect it to be played. Whether it was that or the posthorn solo from Mahler's Symphony No. 3, he would expect that to be played in the way that Leonard Bernstein wanted to hear it. In retrospect, I think it was a sensational way to teach this particular group of students. By the time you graduated you could absolutely read anything with any trumpet.

  Manny Laureano

  Thinking, Play, Style

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• A young man, just beginning the study of musical composition, once went to Mozart and asked him the formula for developing the theme of a symphony. Mozart suggested that a symphony was rather an ambitious project for a beginner: perhaps the young man might better try his hand at something simpler first. "But you were writing symphonies when you were my age." the student protested. "Yes, but I didn't have to ask how."

  James Keller

  Music, Writing, Men

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• Geography is crucial for my work. I went to Antarctica and took a studio to several of the main ice fields to make field recordings of ice to create a symphony - acoustic portraits of ice.

  DJ Spooky

  Ice, Acoustics, Portraits

  "DJ Spooky’s Icy Philharmonic". Interview with Hannah Levintova, www.motherjones.com. October 17, 2011.

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• Karen rowed for what the venerable American shell builder George Pocock called `the symphony of motion.' As dawn breaks over the river, the shell is lifted from its rack out into the morning. On another rack the oars hang ready to be greased and slipped into the locks. Then, awakened to the river and the feel of the oars, the oarsmen blend in fulfillment of the shell. The symphony is not of competition. It is the synchronous motion over water, the harmonic flexing of wood and muscle, where each piece of equipment and every oarsman is both essential to, and the limit of motion itself.

  Stefan Kieszling

  Morning, Rivers, Water

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• There are only three forms of high art: the symphony, the illustrated children's book and the board game.

  Brian K. Vaughan

  Art, Children, Book

  Brian K. Vaughan (2014). “Saga, Vol. 3”, p.50, Image Comics

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• I shift between mediums very frequently. Instead of taking a break from writing, I just write in a different medium or in a different way or for a different purpose, so that I don't actually stop writing - I just go to something else. Like going from a big symphony to a piano piece is great and very refreshing, I find. And then going from that to a big concerto, and then having to go out and play.

  Philip Glass

  Writing, Play, Piano

  Interview with Bryce Dessner, www.interviewmagazine.com. February 3, 2014.

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• It's a physical challenge. It's a spiritual challenge. I'm studying almost every day a different symphony, not returning to any one for a week.

  Gustavo Dudamel

  Spiritual, Challenges, Different

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• A friend gave me a CD of the 'Pathetique' Symphony as a Christmas present. I went home, and I put on the CD expecting to listen to Tchaikovsky. But it started 'ta ta ta taaa.' It was too long for me. I didn't understand it at first, but then I fell in love, in love, in love.

  Gustavo Dudamel

  Home, Tchaikovsky, Cds

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• For me to rehearse with a children's orchestra a Mahler symphony was to really work. We had three or four weeks of rehearsal with the orchestra, every day eight or nine hours, putting the First together. I had been conducting Tchaikovsky a lot and Beethoven, but Mahler was different.

  Gustavo Dudamel

  Children, Eight, Tchaikovsky

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• I don't see myself necessarily having a burning desire to write a symphony.

  Danny Elfman

  Writing, Desire, Burning

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• Aristotle ... imputed this symphony of the heavens ... this music of the spheres to Pythagorus. ... But Pythagoras alone of mortals is said to have heard this harmony ... If our hearts were as pure, as chaste, as snowy as Pythagoras' was, our ears would resound and be filled with that supremely lovely music of the wheeling stars.

  John Milton

  Stars, Heart, Science

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• I was always the kid on scholarship, I was a soloist with my company, I'd been working with the symphony since I was 14.

  Summer Glau

  Kids, Scholarship, Company

  Interview with Tasha Robinson, www.avclub.com. February 24, 2008.

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• My show business career doesn't mean I can't write a symphony. It just means I was never asked to write one.

  Marvin Hamlisch

  Writing, Mean, Careers

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• I've worked with actors before where I was like, this is not working, and then I've seen their work on the screen and I've been like, Wow, that was a really great performance. Because there are a lot of elements with film. It's not like stage. It's not a kind of performance art anymore; it's a highly tuned kind of collaboration - a symphony.

  Vincent Kartheiser

  Art, Collaboration, Actors

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• There are no accidents in Nature. Every motion of the constantly shifting bodies in the world is timed to the occasion for some definite, fore-ordered end. The flowers blossom in obedience to the same law that marks the course of constellations, and the song of a bird is the echo of a universal symphony. Nature is one, and to me the greatest delight of observation and study is to discover new unities in this all-embracing and eternal harmony.

  John Muir

  Song, Flower, Echoes

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• Thank God for that. You can shut them, say, 'Hold on a moment.' You play God to it. But who has ever torn himself from the claw that encloses you when you drop a seed in a TV parlour? It grows you any shape it wishes! It is an environment as real as the world. It becomes and is the truth. Books can be beaten down with reason. But with all my knowledge and scepticism, I have never been able to argue with a one-hundred-piece symphony orchestra, full colour, three dimensions, and I being in and part of those incredible parlours.

  Ray Bradbury

  Real, Book, Play

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• I planted some jokes in my wedding. Like, the organizers asked me to select music. So when I approached wife at the ceremony, they played the second movement from Shostakovich's 10th Symphony, which is usually known as the "portrait of Stalin." And then when we embraced, the music that they played was Schubert's "Death and the Maiden." I enjoyed this in a childish way! But marriage was all a nightmare and so on and so on.

  Slavoj Žižek

  Wife, Way, Portraits

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• All these tales of people sitting down and composing symphonies just as though they were writing a letter are very much exaggerated; at least, it isn't that way in my work.

  George Gershwin

  Writing, People, Sitting

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• It seemed to me that had Haydn lived to our day he would have retained his own style while accepting something of the new at the same time. That was the kind of symphony I wanted to write: a symphony in the classical style. And when I saw that my idea was beginning to work, I called it the Classical Symphony.

  Sergei Prokofiev

  Writing, Ideas, Style

  "Sergei Prokofiev: Autobiography, Articles, Reminiscences". Book edited by S. Shlifstein and translated by Rose Prokofieva, p. 46; from the "Autobiography", 1960.

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• Way back in the old days, say in Europe of the Middle Ages, you had an aristocracy, and they could afford to pay for musicians. The kings and queens had musicians in the castles, and that developed into symphony orchestras and what we call "Classical music" now.

  Pete Seeger

  Kings, Queens, Europe

  Source: www.folkmusicworldwide.com

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