Symphony Quotes - Page 10

• Life is everywhere. The earth is throbbing with it - it's like music. The plants, the creatures, the ones we see, the ones we don't see, it's like one, big, pulsating symphony.

  Diane Frolov

  Life, Earth, Plant

  "Fictional character: Maggie O'Connell". "Northern Exposure" ("Mite Makes Right"), Season 5, Episode 13, 1994.

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• Comics play a trite but lusty tune on the C natural keys of human nature. They rouse the most primitive, but also the most powerful, reverberations in the noisy cranial sound-box of consciousness, drowning out more subtle symphonies. Comics scorn finesse, thereby incurring the wrath of linguistic adepts. They defy the limits of accepted fact and convention, thus amortizing to apoplexy the ossified arteries of routine thought.

  William Moulton Marston

  Powerful, Book, Keys

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• The point of recapitulation in the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony unleashes one of the most horrifyingly violent episodes in the history of music....The point is not to hold up Beethoven as exceptionally monstrous. The Ninth Symphony is probably our most compelling articulation in music of the contradictory impulses that have organized patriarchal culture since the Enlightenment. Moreover, within the parameters of his own musical compositions, he may be heard as enacting a critique of narrative obligations that is...devestating.

  Susan McClary

  Musical, Enlightenment, Firsts

  "Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality". Book by Susan McClary, 1991.

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• When I auditioned actors I never make them act. I choose a long symphony, then I tell them to sit down and I play the symphony for them. Then I sit and I look at them. I always pick a piece of music that has up and downs, very dramatic parts, very quiet parts and really sensitive parts so that it can produce different emotions.

  Pirjo Honkasalo

  Play, Long, Different

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• The degree of talent, the size of the gift, is immaterial. All artists must listen, but not all hear great symphonies, see wide canvasses, conceive complex, character-filled novels. No
  matter, the creative act is the same, and it is an act of faith.

  Madeleine L'Engle

  Character, Artist, Creative

  FaceBook post by Madeleine L'Engle from Jan 01, 2017

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• The majority of my symphonies are tombstones.

  Dmitri Shostakovich

  Tombstone, Majority

  "Testimony" by Dmitri Shostakovich, translated by Antonina W. Bouis, New York: Limelight, (p. 156), 2004.

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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, Piano

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• Most of the things that really matter require faith. How do I know that my wife loves me? How do I know that Mozarts Jupiter Symphony is sublime and beautiful? There are all sorts of things which come at a more lowly level than that - How do I know that two plus two equals four? There are different layers, different types of knowing.

  N. T. Wright

  Beautiful, Two, Knowing

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• Fear never wrote a symphony or poem, negotiated a peace treaty, or cured a disease. Fear never pulled a family out of poverty or a country out of bigotry.  Fear never saved a marriage or a business.  Courage did that.  Faith did that. People who refused to consult or cower to their timidities did that.  But fear itself?  Fear herds us into a prison and slams the doors.  Wouldn't it be great to walk out?

  Max Lucado

  Inspirational, Faith, Country

  Max Lucado (2012). “Fearless: Imagine Your Life Without Fear”, p.5, Thomas Nelson Inc

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• Symphonies can generate a tremendous amount of sounds, beauty, and emotion. That is part of their human feel and sweetness. Keyboards, on the other hand, give us access to millions of sounds. When I put the two together, the result is unique, and it’s not only pleasing to the ear, but produces emotional responses that neither of the two can achieve on their own.

  Yanni

  Unique, Emotional, Hands

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• I think that of my 21 symphonies, each has its own place.

  Alan Hovhaness

  Thinking

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• Whatever I do today is the whole continuum of my experience. Like John Dewey said in his book ‘Art as Experience,’ you can’t separate experience from the work of art. So, if I write for the symphony today, you’re listening to everything that’s happened to me since I was 18 years old.

  Yusef Lateef

  Art, Book, Writing

  Yusef Lateef, Herb Boyd (2006). “The Gentle Giant: The Autobiography of Yusef Lateef”, p.176, morton books, inc

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• For a man to argue, 'I don't go to church; I pray alone,' is no wiser than if he should say, 'I have no use for symphonies; I believe only in solo music.'

  George Arthur Buttrick

  Christian, Believe, Men

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• Mathematics is an activity governed by the same rules imposed upon the symphonies of Beethoven, the paintings of DaVinci, and the poetry of Homer.

  Edward Kasner

  Painting, Mathematics, Mathematical

  Edward Kasner, James Newman (2013). “Mathematics and the Imagination”, p.362, Courier Corporation

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• Now I'm having the time of my life being on the road with one of the world's all-time great big bands, and performing with symphonies. I wouldn't trade it for anything.

  Doc Severinsen

  Band, World, Bigs

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• Creativity is seeing what everyone else sees, but then thinking a new thought that has never been thought before and expressing it somehow. It could be with art, a sculpture, music or even in science. The difference, however, between scientific creativity and any other kind of creativity, is that no matter how long you wait, no one else will ever compose "Beethoven's Ninth Symphony" except for Beethoven. No matter what you do, no one else will paint Van Gogh's "Starry Night." Only Van Gogh could do that because it came from his creativity.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Art, Creativity, Night

  "Global Ideas from Pluto's Challenger". Converge Magazine, May 21, 2009.

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• The music critic, Huneber, could never quite make up his mind about a new symphony until he had seen the composer's mistress.

  H. L. Mencken

  Music, Mind, Mistress

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• Elgar's first symphony is the musical equivalent of St Pancras Railway Station.

  Thomas Beecham

  Music, Firsts, Railway Station

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• For an instant God opens his door and His orchestra plays the Fifth Symphony.

  Jean Sibelius

  Doors, Play, Orchestra

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• Faust, the Ninth Symphony, and the will of Adolf Hitler are eternal youth and know neither time nor transience.

  Baldur von Schirach

  Youth, Faust, Eternal

  "The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership". Book by Joachim C. Fest , p. 221, 1999.

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• Audiences, whether they're seeing a film or a reading or whatever it is, a concert, they decide very quickly what kind of show it is, and then they judge it. They judge the rest of the thing by whether it conforms to their rules for what a good symphony orchestra would be.

  Laurie Anderson

  Reading, Judging, Would Be

  The Believer Interview, www.believermag.com. January, 2012.

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• It is (often) the quiet gesture which carries the most significance - the one which suddenly directs the symphony.

  Mary Anne Radmacher

  Gestures, Quiet, Significance

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• I think my first impression (of Bix Beiderbecke) was the lasting one. I remember very clearly thinking, 'Where, what planet, did this guy come from? Is he from outer space?' I'd never heard anything like the way he played-not in Chicago, no place. The tone-he had this wonderful, ringing cornet tone. He could have played in a symphony orchestra with that tone. But also the intervals he played, the figures-whatever the hell he did. There was a refinement about his playing. You know, in those days I played a little trumpet, and I could play all the solos from his records, by heart.

  Benny Goodman

  Heart, Thinking, Play

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• The West has given the world the symphony, and the novel.

  Ibn Warraq

  World, West, Given

  Ibn Warraq (2013). “Why the West is Best: A Muslim Apostate's Defense of Liberal Democracy”, p.17, Encounter Books

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• My whole family is in the arts some way or the other. My father was a cellist in a symphony outside Chicago that was a side-job, he was a scientist. My mother was a dancer in New York. She was next-door neighbors with Dorothy Loudon and they moved to New York together. Mom was a dancer in New York for several years before she got married. My sister was a classical pianist. And my brother was a partier. So it all just seemed to work.

  Jason Graae

  Mom, Mother, Brother

  Source: www.broadwayworld.com

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