When I am with composers, I say I am a conductor. When I am with conductors, I say I am a composer.
Our most emotionally active life is lived in our dreams, and our cells renew themselves most industriously in sleep. We reach highest in meditation, and farthest in prayer. In stillness every human being is great; he is free from the experience of hostility; he is a poet, and most like an angel.
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.
Einstein said that "the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious." So why do so many of us try to explain the beauty of music, thus depriving it of its mystery?
I'm no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is Yes.
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, all of you, are endowed with the powers of fantasy.
Conducting is like making love to a hundred people at the same time.
Life without music is unthinkable. Life without music is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.
We musicians, like everyone else, are numb with sorrow at this murder, and with rage at the senselessness of the crime. But this sorrow and rage will not inflame us to seek retribution; rather they will inflame our art. Our music will never again be quite the same. This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before. And with each note we will honor the spirit of John Kennedy, commemorate his courage, and reaffirm his faith in the Triumph of the Mind.
Life without music is unthinkable.
Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.
Any asshole can write a tone-row. It takes a composer to write a tune.
In the olden days, everybody sang. You were expected to sing as well as talk. It was a mark of the cultured man to sing.
Mozart combines serenity, melancholy, and tragic intensity into one great lyric improvisation. Over it all hovers the greater spirit that is Mozart's - the spirit of compassion, of universal love, even of suffering - a spirit that knows no age, that belongs to all ages.
It would be nice to hear someone accidentally whistle something of mine, somewhere, just once.
Success is all very well as long as you don't inhale.
The most difficult instrument to play in the orchestra is second fiddle.
Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.
Perhaps the chief requirement of [the conductor] is that he be humble before the composer; that he never interpose himself between the music and the audience; that all his efforts, however strenuous or glamorous, be made in the service of the composer's meaning - the music itself, which, after all, is the whole reason for the conductor's existence.
The 20th century has been a badly written drama, from the beginning.
I believe that from that Earth emerges a musical poetry, which is by the nature of its sources tonal. I believe that these sources cause to exist a phonology of music, which evolves from the universal known as the harmonic series.
Elvis is the greatest cultural force in the twentieth century. He introduced the beat to everything, music, language, clothes, it's a whole new social revolution - the 60's comes from it.
From New Year's on the outlook brightens; good humor lost in a mood of failure returns. I resolve to stop complaining.
If you're a good composer, you steal good steals.
The Rhapsody is not a composition at all. It's a string of separate paragraphs stuck together - with a thin paste of flour and water... I don't think there has been such an inspired melodist on this earth since Tchaikovsky... but if you want to speak of a composer, that's another matter.
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