Orchestra Quotes - Page 9

• If a professional musician in a symphony orchestra is playing Beethoven. But this particular orchestra have played this particular chestnut so many times, they can play it in their sleep. Does the genius remain present in the music or not?

  Robert Fripp

  Sleep, Play, Symphony

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• Great cataclysmic things can go by and neither the orchestra nor the conductor are under the delusion that whether they make this or that gesture is going to be the deciding factor in how it comes out.

  James Levine

  Gestures, Delusion, Conductor

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• In the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra we play such a diversity of music, with 10 arrangers in the band, we don't really worry about whether it's contemporary or not.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Lincoln Center, Play, Diversity

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• I often think of random melodies. And I pretty much hear in my head what I want to do with the orchestra as I'm writing on the piano.

  Andrew Lloyd Webber

  Writing, Thinking, Piano

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• One time I introduced my orchestra as the Shampoo Music Makers instead of the Champagne Music Makers.

  Lawrence Welk

  Music, Shampoo, Makers

  Lawrence Welk, Bernice McGeehan (1973). “Wunnerful, Wunnerful: The Autobiography of Lawrence Welk”

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• When you hear a large symphony orchestra. for instance, in a concert hall, there's a big, sweeping sound that just doesn't get on to a record.

  Teddy Wilson

  Symphony, Sound, Records

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• Yes, but I view Frank's music as fully composed. In other words, the arrangements can work for any idiom such as a rock band or an orchestra. Frank was a brilliant arranger and could make his music work in any context. He proved that tour after tour and album after album.

  Dweezil Zappa

  Music, Rocks, Views

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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, Symphony

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• I said old Jesus probably would've puked if He could see it - all those fancy costumes and all. Sally said I was a sacrilegious atheist. I probably am. The thing Jesus really would've liked would be the guy who plays the kettle drums in the orchestra.

  J. D. Salinger

  Jesus, Atheist, Play

  J. D. SALINGER (1951). “THE CATCHER IN THE RYE”

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• May night continue to fall upon the orchestra

  Andre Breton

  Fall, Night, May

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• Many nights he lay there dreaming awake of secret cafés in Mont Marte, where ivory women delved in romantic mysteries with diplomats and soldiers of fortune, while orchestras played Hungarian waltzes and the air was thick and exotic with intrigue and moonlight and adventure.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Dream, Adventure, Night

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• Then the bow orchestra began to play an apocalyptically beautiful canon, one of those pieces in which, surely, the composer simply transcribed what was given, and trembled in awe of the hand that was guiding him.

  Mark Helprin

  Beautiful, Hands, Play

  Mark Helprin (1983). “Winter's Tale”, p.433, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Composer” is a word which here means “a person who sits in a room, muttering and humming and figuring out what notes the orchestra is going to play.” This is called composing. But last night, the Composer was not muttering. He was not humming. He was not moving, or even breathing. This is called decomposing.

  Daniel Handler

  Moving, Mean, Night

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• Pardon me for loitering in front of an orchestra.

  John Goodman

  Pardon Me, Pardon, Fronts

  "PASSAGES: Oprah's Early Father's Day" by Stephen M. Silverman, people.com. May 5, 2003.

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• Originally I had a block about appearing in a musical. I went to a voice teacher for a while, but that did no good. My range is about one and a half notes. I ended up talking the musical numbers, which was revolutionary at the time. The lyrics are extremely intricate. They move along like a precisely acted scene. If you miss a word - heaven help you - the orchestra rattles past like an express train, and you've got to run like the devil to catch up.

  Rex Harrison

  Running, Teacher, Block

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• As long as I can sing halfway decent, I'd rather sing than act. There's nothing like being in good voice, feeling good, having good numbers to do and having a fine orchestra.

  Howard Keel

  Voice, Numbers, Long

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• As major orchestras around the world are gripped in various kinds of crises and upheaval, we need to be sure that we are bringing up this new generation.

  James Levine

  Needs, Generations, Upheaval

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• There are some good people in it, but the orchestra as a whole is equivalent
  to a gang bent on destruction.

  John Cage

  People, Gang, Destruction

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• A wonderful, warm, positive individual who exhibits the values that are prerequisite to a significant faculty post in higher education, I think that it is an absolutely extraordinary and bold career move that Darwin has made in leaving the Orchestra and embarking on the trajectory of a solo performer/educator. And what a marvelous thing it is for Detroit to be able to welcome home a successful native son - one in whom the community can take pride, and one who will serve as an inspiration to a younger generation of aspiring performers eager to make their mark in the world.

  David Cerone

  Inspiration, Moving, Home

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• For me it always comes down to what is a good song and I'm very old fashioned in the way that I like to make songs that have something classic about them whether you can play them with an orchestra or an electro synthesizer or an acoustic guitar.

  Marc Almond

  Song, Guitar, Play

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• His style has the desperate jauntiness of an orchestra fiddling away for dear life on a sinking ship.

  Edmund Wilson

  Life, Inspire, Style

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• I just remember standing there, singing with the headphones on and the strings playing, just how wonderful that felt. But we so rarely got to go out and do it. Obviously, we don't carry a 70-80-piece orchestra with us when we do shows.

  Ricky Skaggs

  Singing, Pieces, Remember

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• I suppose, counting back, if the Beatles had been influenced by music in the same length of time ago - you'd have to put that into better English for me, thank you - they would have been like a banjo orchestra. They would have been doing show tunes.

  Jonny Greenwood

  Thank You, Tunes, Length

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• We ought to approach this challenge [of global warming] with a sense of profound joy and gratitude: that we are the generation about which, a thousand years from now, philharmonic orchestras and poets and singers will celebrate by saying, they were the ones that found it within themselves to solve this crisis and lay the basis for a bright and optimistic human future.

  Al Gore

  Gratitude, Optimistic, Years

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• You can play Bach on the piano, a symphony orchestra or a quartet of saxophones, but let's stop this silly, childish business of knit your own musicology

  Paul McCreesh

  Silly, Play, Symphony

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