Symphony Quotes - Page 8

• When I was to come to Washington the first time as Music Director of the Boston Symphony, Mrs. Johnson phoned us to find out if they could give us a party and who we would like to meet.

  Erich Leinsdorf

  Party, Boston, Giving

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• Tanglewood [summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra] was a place where gods strode the earth.

  Sarah Caldwell

  Summer, Home, Boston

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• I'm often surprised by classical music and musicians. I've met a large number of them because my wife works for the Boston Symphony, and I'm in that world a lot now. I'm surprised at how difficult it is for people who are classically trained to read music or to memorize music, how difficult it is for them to improvise, to just go off and play. It's sort of, it's like terra incognita. They just, (makes noise) they don't get it.

  James Taylor

  Boston, Play, Numbers

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Music will still be a big part of our environment. The Bible talks about choirs of angels and how there is singing in Heaven. We're going to have the greatest choirs, the greatest bands and symphony orchestras, the greatest music that the world has ever known. The world has never even heard music yet compared to what we're going to have there! If humans can make the beautiful music they have learned to make with these hand-made instruments, think what God can do supernaturally!

  David Berg

  Beautiful, Angel, Thinking

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• It is so easy to waste our lives: our days, our hours, our minutes. It is so easy to take for granted the pale new growth on an evergreen, the sheen of the limestone on Fifth Avenue, the colour of our kids’ eyes, the way the melody in a symphony rises and falls and disappears and rises again. It is so easy to exist instead of live. Unless you know there is a clock ticking.

  Anna Quindlen

  Fall, Kids, Eye

  Anna Quindlen (2002). “A Short Guide to a Happy Life”, Arrow/Children's (a Division of Random House Group)

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• Cartoons are perhaps a bigger part of art than is generally realized, and they influence people in ways that are not always recognized. But creating a monumental work of architecture, or writing a great symphony, is something else. It's a higher order of creation.

  Jim Woodring

  Art, Writing, Creating

  Interview with Ross Simonini, staging.believermag.com. 2008.

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• Velázquez, past the age of fifty, no longer painted specific objects. He drifted around things like the air, like twilight, catching unawares in the shimmering shadows the nuances of color that he transformed into the invisible core of his silent symphony.

  Elie Faure

  Twilight, Past, Air

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• My musical genius reached its apex thirty years ago when I played the triangle in Haydn's children's symphony, so I could not play unless you needed someone to make one sustained note!

  May Sarton

  Children, Musical Genius, Years

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• Ayn Rand held that art is a 're-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgements.' By its nature, therefore, a novel (like a statue or a symphony) does not require or tolerate an explanatory preface; it is a self-contained universe, aloof from commentary, beckoning the reader to enter, perceive, respond.

  Leonard Peikoff

  Art, Reality, Self

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• Brahms stayed an extra day to hear my [Fifth] Symphony and was very kind ... I like his honesty and open-mindedness. Neither he nor the players liked the finale, which I also think rather horrible.

  Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

  Honesty, Player, Thinking

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• An artist should make concessions to the listener. That is why Bruckner dedicated one of his symphonies to the Good Lord.

  Karl Kraus

  Artist, Lord, Should

  Karl Kraus (1976). “Half-truths & One-and-a-half Truths: Selected Aphorisms”

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• The mature person becomes able to differentiate feelings into as many nuances, strong and passionate experiences, or delicate and sensitive ones, as in the different passages of music in a symphony. Unfortunately, many of us have feelings limited like notes in a bugle call.

  Rollo May

  Strong, Mature Person, Feelings

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• You invest into the future, and that's how young people become human in best sense of it - through the great experience of listening a Müller symphony or to see a great play by Tennessee Williams, experience something in a ballet, in a film.

  Mikhail Baryshnikov

  Play, People, Ballet

  "Dancer-actor Mikhail Baryshnikov". "The Tavis Smiley Show" with Tavis Smiley, www.pbs.org. April 28, 2014.

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• You've been listening to the adagio from Beethoven's 7th Symphony. I think Ludwig pretty much summed up death in this one. You know, he had lost just about all his hearing when he wrote it, and I've often wondered if that didn't help him tune into the final silence of the great beyond.

  Andrew Schneider

  Thinking, Silence, Listening

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• The music left only this bad hurt in her, and a blankness. She could not remember any of the symphony, not even the last few notes. She tried to remember, but no sound at all came to her. Now that it was over there was only her heart like a rabbit and this terrible hurt.

  Carson McCullers

  Hurt, Heart, Numbness

  Carson McCullers (2010). “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter”, p.119, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I have been told that a young would-be composer wrote to Mozart asking advice about how to compose a symphony. Mozart responded that a symphony was a complex and demanding form and it would be better to start with something simpler. The young man protested, 'But, Herr Mozart, you wrote symphonies when you were younger than I am now.' Mozart replied, 'I never asked how.

  Isaac Asimov

  Men, Advice, Would Be

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• If man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. Why, he might ask himself, should he bother to write a great symphony, or strive to make a living, or even to love another, when he is no more than a momentary microbe on a dust mote whirling through the unimaginable immensity of space?

  Stanley Kubrick

  Writing, Men, Space

  Interview with Eric Nordern, Playboy, September 1968.

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• I am going to write my symphony; I'm just going to start tomorrow.

  Steven Pressfield

  Writing, Tomorrow

  Steven Pressfield (2002). “The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles”, p.21, Black Irish Entertainment LLC

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• Winter is on my head, but eternal spring is in my heart. The nearer I approach the end, the plainer I hear around me the immortal symphonies of the worlds which invite me. . . . For half a century I have been writing thoughts in prose, verse, history, drama, romance, tradition, satire, ode, and song. I have tried them all, but I feel I have not said a thousandth part of that which is within me. When I go down to the grave, I can say "I have finished my day's work," but I cannot say "I have finished my life's work."

  Victor Hugo

  Song, Drama, Spring

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• I have put my whole soul into this work [The Pathetique Symphony] . . . You cannot imagine what joy I feel at the thought that my days are not yet over and that I may still accomplish much.

  Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

  Joy, Soul, May

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• Play doesn't have to be a frivolous thing. You may think of a Beethoven symphony as something serious, but it's still being played. I think Oscar Wilde said that life is too important to be taken seriously.

  Jeff Bridges

  Taken, Thinking, Play

  "Jeff Bridges and his Buddhist teacher ruminate on life". Interview with Bernie Glassman, www.today.com. January 8, 2013.

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• I don't work with an outline, except a vague one in my head, a general idea of character, place, arc... I'm like a composer with a symphony in their head: I can hear the music, I just have to figure out how to put it down on paper. But I don't always know where my stories are going when I begin.

  Said Sayrafiezadeh

  Character, Ideas, Stories

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Wine is a chemical symphony. and
  The Aesthetic differentiation of Chesapeake Bay oysters and Olympia oysters occurs only after we can really differentiate them. This differentiation cannot occur until we are thoroughly familiar with both. The same is true with wines.

  Maynard Amerine

  Wine, Oysters, Differentiation

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• To be part of Kevin's [Drew] world, "Who Came First" is just kind of a magical symphony. If you're asking me what that emotional timbre what is my favorite, my favorite "why" is the question. The other songs also have a revealing quality, but it started with "Sister OK".

  Andy Kim

  Song, Emotional, Quality

  Source: www.popmatters.com

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• A Mozart symphony is very much like a Pixar movie - in the sense that Pixar movies are hugely successful because they operate on several levels at the same time.

  Eric Weiner

  Successful, Levels, Pixar

  "How your neighborhood coffee shop is brewing geniuses". Interview with Paul Solman, www.pbs.org. January 21, 2016.

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