Symphony Quotes - Page 11

• What a director does... essentially, it's storytelling, but a director also controls the feeling and the sounds and the texture. It's an act of creation, like a symphony or a painting or a story. But with different tools.

  John Carpenter

  Feelings, Sound, Directors

  Source: www.avclub.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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• You know how it is in the symphony when you are listening to the symphony, the last notes die away, and there's often a beat of silence in the auditorium before the applause begins. It's a very full and pregnant silence. Now theology should bring us to live into that silence, into that pregnant pause.

  Karen Armstrong

  Silence, Listening, Lasts

  "Big Think Interview With Karen Armstrong". Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. November 16, 2009.

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• Women play cellos and violins in symphony orchestras. They're playing Beethoven and Bach. What do you mean they can't play rock and roll?

  Joan Jett

  Mean, Rocks, Rock And Roll

  "Joan Jett Rumbles Back with 'Sinner'". "Day To Day" with Noah Adams, www.npr.org. July 26, 2006.

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• What I'm going for with the string arrangements for my Antarctic symphony is a pun here.

  DJ Spooky

  Strings, Pun, Arrangements

  Source: bigthink.com

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• With ticket prices, do you ask yourself, why I'm paying $70 to see the arts? You say, "No, that's what the symphony is costing me."

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Art, Tickets, Asks

  Source: www.chicagotribune.com

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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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• Conversation never sits easier upon us than when we now and then discharge ourselves in a symphony of laughter, which may not improperly be called the chorus of conversation.

  Richard Steele

  Laughter, May, Now And Then

  Sir Richard Steele, Joseph Addison (1822). “The Guardian”, p.116

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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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• 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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• 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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• The word stands for the body, but the symphony stands for the spirit.

  Hildegard of Bingen

  Body, Spirit

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• An assassin can be found for every president. And for every prophet there are a thousand interpreters to distort the essence of the religion, to replace the bright flame with the heat of the inquisitors' pyres. The time came when every book was cast into the fire, when every symphony was reduced to a popular tune and played in all the drinking dens. A sound philosophical basis could be set in place under any vile nonsense.

  Sergei Lukyanenko

  Drinking, Book, Philosophical

  Sergei Lukyanenko (2006). “Night Watch”, Miramax

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• Do you know how some people can do anything?” “What do you mean?” “I mean, you tell them to write a tune, they give you a symphony right there. You tell them to write a book, they write you a novel in a day. You tell them to move a spoon without touching it, they move it. If they want something, they make it happen. Miracles, almost.

  Maggie Stiefvater

  Moving, Book, Writing

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• Music - so different from painting - is the art which we enjoy most in company with others. A symphony, presented in a room with one other listener, would please him but little.

  Robert Schumann

  Art, Different, Littles

  Robert Schumann (1983). “On Music and Musicians”, p.45, Univ of California Press

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• I'm familiar to people. They feel comfortable with me. I started in live television. I perform live all the time. I sing with the piano. I sing with a symphony. I can sit and ask questions. I can listen. I'm very comfortable in most situations.

  Florence Henderson

  Piano, People, Comfort

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• My mother was the concert master of the symphony. Absurdity and eccentricity were not criticized.

  Martin Short

  Mother, Masters, Concerts

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• Our life a harp is, with unnumbered strings, And tones and symphonies; but our poor skill Some shallow notes from its great music brings.

  John Boyle O'Reilly

  Life, Skills, Tone

  John Boyle O'Reilly (1882). “Songs, Legends and Ballads”

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• Abolishing the book is like abolishing the symphony, or sonata form, or the sonnet, or the wall painting.

  David Gelernter

  Wall, Book, Painting

  Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.

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• When asked by a grumpily puzzled professor what "rules" he followed, Debussy is said to have retorted, mon plaisir "whatever I please" and he further claimed that more was to be gained by watching the sun rise than by listening to the Pastoral Symphony. Although such remarks were intended to shock, they contain a core of Debussyan verity.

  Claude Debussy

  Past, Listening, Sun

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• Loneliness is the theme, and I play it like a symphony, in endless variations.

  Jonathan Tropper

  Loneliness, Play, Variation

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• Proportion ... You can't help thinking about it in these London streets, where it doesn't exist ... It's like listening to a symphony of cats to walk along them. Senseless discords and a horrible disorder all the way ... We need no barbarians from outside; they're on the premises, all the time.

  Aldous Huxley

  Cat, Thinking, Listening

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• These are thy glorious works Parent of Good, Almighty, thine this universal Frame, Thus wondrous fair; thy self how wondrous then! Unspeakable, who sitst above these Heavens To us invisible or dimly seen In these thy lowest works, yet these declare Thy goodness beyond thought, and Power Divine: Speak ye who best can tell, ye Sons of light, Angels, for ye behold him, and with songs And choral symphonies, Day without Night, Circle his Throne rejoicing, ye in Heav'n, On Earth join all ye Creatures to extoll Him first, him last, him midst, and without end.

  John Milton

  God, Song, Angel

  'Paradise Lost' (1667) bk. 5, l. 164

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• The framework of a symphony must be so strong that it forces you to follow it, regardless of the environment and circumstances.

  Jean Sibelius

  Strong, Environment, Framework

  Jean Sibelius' remarks to Jussi Jalas, October 1, 1939.

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