The conductor of an orchestra doesn’t make a sound. He depends, for his power, on his ability to make other people powerful.
— Benjamin Zander
Unpopular Music Orchestra quotations
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?
A band ought to have a sound all of its own. It ought to have a personality.
Sometimes I sensed that the books I read in rapid succession had set up some sort of murmur among themselves, transforming my head into an orchestra pit where different musical instruments sounded out, and I would realize that I could endure this life because of these musicales going on in my head.
Although we are being presented in Carnegie Hall, we have to furnish a budget for our guest stars, and for the music writing - which is a huge budget in any orchestra that plays popular music.
The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body.
Always an orchestra, and just as music traverses walls, so sensuality traverses the body and reaches up to ecstasy.
Shared leadership... is less like a an orchestra, where the conductor is always in charge, and more like a jazz band, where leadership is passed around ... depending on what the music demands at the moment and who feels most moved by the spirit to express the music.
Eventually we want to do a puppet musical with turntables in the orchestra pit.
Eventually we want to do a puppet musical with turntables in the orchestra pit.
Last year in Germany at a town hall in Leipzig there was a game music concert played by the orchestra and some of the Final Fantasy scores were played. This year there is another concert scheduled in the same location, for game music.
One time I introduced my orchestra as the Shampoo Music Makers instead of the Champagne Music Makers.
I've worked with some great orchestras and amazing classical musicians, but I don't like the conceptualization of classical music as an elitist form of art.
Today all sounds belong to a continuous field of possibilities lying within the comprehensive dominion of music. Behold the new orchestra: the sonic universe! And the musicians: anyone and anything that sounds!
Essentially, the [New York] Philharmonic is just like any other orchestra-they all have the spirit of kids, and if you scratch away a little of the fatigue and cynicism, out comes a 17-year-old music student again, full of wonder, exuberance and a tremendous love of music.
Deep inside I feel that this world we live in is really a big, huge, monumental symphonic orchestra. I believe that in its primordial form, all of creation is sound and that it's not just random sound, that it's music.
I never use a score when conducting my orchestra.
.. Does a lion tamer enter a cage with a book on how to tame a lion?
It is when music is added that a film can come to life for a director.
A live orchestra, playing the score as a conductor watches the film on a huge screen, often gives a fimmaker the first real glimpse of his soon-to-be-completed work. That's where the magic is.
Composers love to write for symphony orchestras because the symphony is the Rolls Royce of musical instruments.
There are so many parts of music that it's actually a pleasure for me to work with an orchestra, or a jazz band, or a choir, and use every element that the musical tool box can offer. The world of music I love so much, and I can change the costume depending on the part, and I'm actually in the film.
I never shied away from a challenge and I love doing big, epic films.
They're interesting to me just on a pure music level, just in terms of the amount of music I could create for a symphony orchestra and chorus.
From early on, when synthesizers were first introduced into music, I liked the idea that you could get a big sound with them - electronic, but like an orchestra. And I could play it all myself. That was exciting.
I'm too busy playing. When I'm playing I don't pay attention to who's listening. When I was listening I listened to symphony orchestras, Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Stravinsky. You don't listen to one instrument; you listen to music.
No symphony orchestra ever played music like a two-year-old girl laughing with a puppy.
I had a big background in listening to classical music and I started trying to compose, like I was playing the guitar but I heard an orchestra in my head.
In symphonic music, when you are conducting, you do the same thing.
You are feeling the whole orchestra, thinking ahead so you can prepare for a change.
The rhythm of music is very, very important for people with Parkinson's.
But it's also very important with other sorts of patients, such as patients with Tourette's syndrome. Music helps them bring their impulses and tics under control. There is even a whole percussion orchestra made up exclusively of Tourette's patients.
And we would play together, like fine musicians should, And it would sound like music, and the music would sound good. But in real life I'm stuck with that same old formula, me and my monophonic symphony, six string orchestra.
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.
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.
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.
And what unity is to be had, at a time when orchestras are dying out, and when opera houses are about to close their doors; what's going to come next - when nothing new in music, for the orchestra, is truly lasting: pieces are performed once, and then they're thrown away.
There is much modern music that is better adapted to a wind combination than to a string, although for obvious reasons originally scored for an orchestra. If in such cases the interpretation is equal to the composition the balance of a wind combination is more satisfying.
I used to go with him and I'd sometimes play, take over from him.
That was my first taste of the music business, I suppose, but I was also in the youth orchestra at Johnston Grammar.
Jazz is not a game of chance. Its sonorous disorder is only an appearance. It is an organized force obeying obscure laws, conforming to a secret technique, codified or not, and we discover that no one can become a virtuoso on the spur of the moment in this orchestra of 'noisemakers.