Symphony Quotes - Page 13

• 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.

  37 Copy quote

  Show source

• I don't think that either self-deprecation or self-aggrandizement is among the defining qualities of an artist... Beethoven could have been forgiven if his symphonies had gone to his head. Gretchaninoff could also be forgiven if his Dobrinya Nikititch went to his head. But neither one could be forgiven for writing a piece that was amoral, servile, the work of a flunky.

  Dmitri Shostakovich

  Writing, Artist, Thinking

  "Composers on Music". Book edited by Josiah Fisk and Jeff Nichols, p. 354, letter to Isaac Glikman (February 26, 1960), 1997.

  29 Copy quote

  Show source

• Why is composing symphonies tough? I don't know. It's just very few people in the world can do it well. And I think that's the case with upfront design. It is very hard to do well.

  Martin Fowler

  Thinking, People, Design

  "Evolutionary Design". Interview with Bill Venners, www.artima.com. November 18, 2002.

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• What is history? Its beginning is that of the centuries of systematic work devoted to the solution of the enigma of death, so that death itself may eventually be overcome. That is why people write symphonies, and why they discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves.

  Boris Pasternak

  Writing, People, Overcoming

  58 Copy quote

• every artist is both male and female, and ... sometimes, the two great elements are in conjunction with him, so that all by himself he suddenly gets the melody and the burst of feeling of a great symphony without any external stimuli.

  Ruth St. Denis

  Artist, Two, Feelings

  8 Copy quote

• Paris in the early morning has a cheerful, bustling aspect, a promise of delicious things to come, a positive smell of coffee and croissants, quite peculiar to itself. The people welcome a new day as if they were certain of liking it, the shopkeepers pull up their blinds serene in the expectation of good trade, the workers go happily to their work, the people who have sat up all night in night-clubs go happily to their rest, the orchestra of motor-car horns, of clanking trams, of whistling policemen tunes up for the daily symphony, and everywhere is joy.

  Nancy Mitford

  Morning, Coffee, Night

  Nancy Mitford (1963). “The Nancy Mitford Omnibus”

  58 Copy quote

  Show source

• One song isn't going to ever change things, but I suppose it's the accumulation of music generally [that is]. If you can imagine a world that has no music in it, it would be a very different world, so music does change the world by virtue of all the music in it. Cumulative music of every kind, from banging a drum to playing a flute or recording symphonies, or singing 'War, what is it good for?' All those things change the whole way we live.

  Mick Jagger

  Song, War, Singing

  Source: www.indielondon.co.uk

  55 Copy quote

  Show source

• your concert-goer, though he feed upon symphony as a lamb upon milk, is no true lover if he play no instrument. Your true lover does more than admire the muse; he sweats a little in her service.

  Catherine Drinker Bowen

  Music, Play, Sweat

  Catherine Drinker Bowen (1939). “Friends and fiddlers”

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• [On being asked how it felt to be the first female conductor of the Boston Symphony:] I've been a woman for a little more than fifty years, and I've gotten over my original astonishment.

  Nadia Boulanger

  Music, Women, Years

  11 Copy quote

• Soccer and sports are entertainment ... You can't call Beethoven's 9th Symphony or a work of Shakespeare `entertainment.' It's not `entertainment.' It's culture.

  Riccardo Muti

  Soccer, Sports, Culture

  8 Copy quote

• A man of intellect is like an artist who gives a concert without any help from anyone else, playing on a single instrument--a piano, say, which is a little orchestra in itself. Such a man is a little world in himself; and the effect produced by various instruments together, he produces single-handed, in the unity of his own consciousness. Like the piano, he has no place in a symphony; he is a soloist and performs by himself--in soli tude, it may be; or if in the company with other instruments, only as principal; or for setting the tone, as in singing.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Men, Artist, Piano

  Arthur Schopenhauer (2012). “Counsels and Maxims”, p.21, Simon and Schuster

  6 Copy quote

  Show source

• Life is horrible, but it is not relentlessly black from wire to wire. You can sit down and hear a Mozart symphony, or you can watch the Marx Brothers, and this will give you a pleasant escape for a while. And that is about the best that you can do.

  Woody Allen

  Brother, Giving, Black

  "Woody Allen's World: Whatever Works". Interview with Robert E. Lauder, www.commonwealmagazine.org. April 15, 2010.

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• And what, then, is belief? It is the demi-cadence which closes a musical phrase in the symphony of our intellectual life.

  Charles Sanders Peirce

  Intellectual, Musical, Phrases

  Charles Sanders Peirce (1958). “Selected Writings (Values in a Universe of Chance)”, p.121, Courier Corporation

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• The symphony orchestra had played poorly, so the conductor was in a bad mood. That night he beat his wife--because the music hadn't been beautiful enough.

  George Carlin

  Beautiful, Night, Wife

  George Carlin (1998). “Brain Droppings”, Hyperion

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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, Lines, Littles

  4 Copy quote

• in the cupboard sits my bottle like a dwarf waiting to scratch out my prayers. I drink and cough like some idiot at a symphony, sunlight and maddened birds are everywhere, the phone rings gamboling its sound against the odds of the crooked sea; I drink deeply and evenly now, I drink to paradise and death and the lie of love.

  Charles Bukowski

  Prayer, Lying, Drinking

  4 Copy quote

• There is joy in self-forgetfulness. So I try to make the light in others' eyes my sun, the music in others' ears my symphony, the smile on others' lips my happiness.

  Helen Keller

  Eye, Light, Self

  Helen Keller (2015). “The Story of My Life: Top Biography”, p.72, 谷月社

  16 Copy quote

  Show source

• I say the same thing about the death of James Wait. "Oh, well -- he wasn't going to write the Beethoven's Ninth Symphony anyway.

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Writing, Waiting, Oh Well

  4 Copy quote

• Without "Louie Louie" a symphony is not quite so grand.

  Frank Zappa

  6 Copy quote

• Many consider that Shostakovich is the greatest 20th-century composer. In his 15 symphonies, 15 quartets, and in other works he demonstrated mastery of the largest and most challenging forms with music of great emotional power and technical invention...All his works are marked by emotional extremes - tragic intensity, grotesque and bizarre wit, humour, parody, and savage sarcasm.

  Dmitri Shostakovich

  Sarcasm, Emotional, Challenges

  11 Copy quote

• Art lives on the mental plane (the real painting is not the set of dry pigments on the canvas nor is a symphony the sequence of sound waves that convey it to our ear) but, as the post-modernists insist, is reinterpreted in new contexts by each appreciator. As for gossip, which includes the vast majority of our thoughts, its essence is its relation to a unique local part of time and space.

  David Mumford

  Art, Real, Unique

  9 Copy quote

• A visionary company is like a great work of art. Think of Michelangelo's scenes from Genesis on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or his statue of David. Think of a great and enduring novel like Huckleberry Finn or Crime and Punishment. Think of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony or Shakespeare's Henry V. Think of a beautifully designed building, like the masterpieces of Frank Lloyd Wright or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. You can't point to any one single item that makes the whole thing work; it's the entire work-all the pieces working together to create an overall effect-that leads to enduring greatness.

  John C. Maxwell

  Art, Greatness, Thinking

  John C. Maxwell (2003). “Thinking for a Change: 11 Ways Highly Successful People Approach Life and Work”, p.15, Hachette UK

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Blood Dazzler is Patricia Smith's impassioned lyric chronicle of a beloved city in peril, a city whose people were left to die before us all, a people who were the heart of our country and lifeblood of our culture. After rising water, winds and abandonment, after our failure and neglect, comes this symphony of utterance from the ruins: many-voiced, poignant, sorrowful and fierce. This is poetry taking the full measure of its task.

  Carolyn Forche

  Country, Heart, Wind

  4 Copy quote

• The Hour-Hand of Life --- Life consists of rare, isolated moments of the greatest significance, and of innumerably many intervals, during which at best the silhouettes of those moments hover about us. Love, springtime, every beautiful melody, mountains, the moon, the sea - all these speak completely to the heart but once, if in fact they ever do get a chance to speak completely. For many men do not have those moments at all, and are themselves intervals and intermissions in the symphony of real life.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Beautiful, Real, Heart

  Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1984). “Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits”, p.247, U of Nebraska Press

  28 Copy quote

  Show source

• If P=NP, then the world would be a profoundly different place than we usually assume it to be. There would be no special value in “creative leaps,” no fundamental gap between solving a problem and recognizing the solution once it's found. Everyone who could appreciate a symphony would be Mozart; everyone who could follow a step-by-step argument would be Gauss; everyone who could recognize a good investment strategy would be Warren Buffett.

  Scott Aaronson

  Appreciate, Creative, Special

  "Reasons to Believe". Personal blog post, www.scottaaronson.com. September 04, 2006.

  20 Copy quote

  Show source