Conductor Quotes - Page 4

• The most important thing to do is really listen.

  Itzhak Perlman

  Important, Things To Do, Important Things

  FaceBook post by Itzhak Perlman from Dec 21, 2012

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• Madam, you have between your legs an instrument capable of giving pleasure to thousands and all you can do is scratch it.

  Thomas Beecham

  Giving, Musical, Scratches

  To a cellist; attributed, no source found

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• Did you play? It sounded very good.

  Eugene Ormandy

  Funny, Play, Orchestra

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• A lot of entrepreneurs let ego get in the way. You've got to be the conductor. You can't play all the instruments yourself. You have to get others to work together.

  Bill Rancic

  Play, Entrepreneur, Ego

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• So much of what we do is ephemeral and quickly forgotten, even by ourselves, so it's gratifying to have something you have done linger in people's memories.

  John Towner Williams

  Memories, People, Done

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• Never miss an opportunity to teach; when you teach others, you teach yourself.

  Itzhak Perlman

  Learning, Opportunity, Missing

  Twitter post from Oct 05, 2012

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• Santa Claus has the right idea - visit people only once a year.

  Victor Borge

  Funny, Christmas, Witty

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• Joy is not in things; it is in us.

  Richard Wagner

  Inspirational, Positive, Happiness

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• [A conductor's] happiness does not come from only his own story and his joy of the music. The joy is about enabling other people's stories to be heard at the same time.

  Itay Talgam

  Motivation, Inspiration, People

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• The great conductor is always a despot by temperament and intractable in his ways. ... The artist is obliged to keep his laughter and tears to himself. If they want to emerge, in spite of himself, then he must hide them or unleash them in someone else.

  Nadia Boulanger

  Music, Laughter, Artist

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• Conductors do not know how the oboe does its work, but they know what the oboe should contribute.

  Peter Drucker

  Doe, Oboes, Should

  Peter Drucker (2012). “Post-Capitalist Society”, p.97, Routledge

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• The great myth is the manager as orchestra conductor. It's this idea of standing on a pedestal and you wave your baton and accounting comes in, and you wave it somewhere else and marketing chimes in with accounting, and they all sound very glorious. But management is more like orchestra conducting during rehearsals, when everything is going wrong.

  Henry Mintzberg

  Somewhere Else, Ideas, Marketing

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• Laughter is the closest distance between two people.

  Victor Borge

  Inspirational, Cute, Relationship

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• The greatest contribution jazz has made in music has been to replace the role of the conductor with a member of the ensemble who, instead of waving his arms to keep time and convey mood, is an active member of the musical statement. That person is the drummer.

  Elvin Jones

  Musical, Ensemble, Arms

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• Baton technique is to a conductor what fingers are to a pianist.

  Igor Markevitch

  Technique, Fingers, Pianist

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• The conductor is the artistic leader and sometimes cultural arbiter of his or her community. It is their leadership that is looked to and should anything go wrong, they are the persons taking most of the heat.

  Leonard Slatkin

  Community, Leader, Anything Goes

  "Star-Spangled Baton?" by Leonard Slatkin, www.huffingtonpost.com. May 20, 2013.

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• I always maintain that playing in an orchestra intelligently is the best school for democracy. If you play a solo, the conductor and everybody in the orchestra follows you. Then, a few bars later, the main voice goes to another instrument, another group, and then you have to go back into the collective [sound]. The art of playing in an orchestra is being able to express yourself to the maximum but always in relation to something else that is going on.

  Daniel Barenboim

  Art, School, Play

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• Composing is like driving down a foggy road.

  Benjamin Britten

  Bricks And Mortar, Fog, Driving

  "The Classical Music Experience: Discover the Music of the World's Greatest Composers". Book by Julius H. Jacobson (p.341), 2008.

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• If a train doesn’t stop at your station, it’s simply because it’s not your train. Don’t try to flag down the conductor and convince them to stop there, even if their own map says that they should just keep going. You may not realize it, but there’s another train trying to come toward you, unable to get into your station because a train that doesn’t even belong there is being delayed there by your intensity.

  Marianne Williamson

  Trying, Flags, Maps

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• I played with the best
  conductors of the world.

  Mstislav Rostropovich

  World

  "Mstislav Rostropovich, 80, Dissident Maestro, Dies" by Allan Kozinn, www.nytimes.com. April 27, 2007.

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• At every moment, each instrument knew what to play. Its little bit. But none could see the whole thing like this, all at once, only its own part. Just like life. Each person was like a line of music, but nobody knew what the symphony sounded like. Only the conductor had the whole score.

  Janet Fitch

  Play, Symphony, Lines

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• The imagination ... that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the reason in images of the sense and organizing (as it were) the flux of the senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors.

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge

  Self, Imagination, Giving

  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, James Engell, Walter Jackson Bate (1984). “Biographia Literaria, Or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions”, p.156, Princeton University Press

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• The phosphorous smell which is developed when electricity (to speak the profane language) is passing from the points of a conductor into air, or when lightning happens to fall upon some terrestrial object, or when water is electrolysed, has been engaging my attention the last couple of years, and induced me to make many attempts at clearing up that mysterious phenomenon. Though baffled for a long time, at last, I think, I have succeeded so far as to have got the clue which will lead to the discovery of the true cause of the smell in question.

  Christian Friedrich Schonbein

  Success, Couple, Fall

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• Lately, my mind is like an orchestra. If you don't have the conductor, you don't know what to do. One guy is playing jazz, one guy is playing rock and roll, another classical. It's a big mess.

  Goran Ivanisevic

  Rocks, Rock And Roll, Guy

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• It is becoming increasingly difficult to obtain the services of first-class conductors. They are sick and tired of dealing with singers, as I am.

  Rudolf Bing

  Tired, Class, Sick

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