Symphony Quotes

In truth, I became a conductor because deep down I wanted to conduct Brahmss four symphonies and Richard Strausss tone poems.

A great symphony is a man-made Mississippi down which we irresistibly flow from the instant of our leave-taking to a long forseen destination.

Tanglewood [summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra] was a place where gods strode the earth.

No symphony orchestra ever played music like a two-year-old girl laughing with a puppy.

Writing a play, you start with less, so more is demanded of you. It's as if you have to not only write a symphony, but invent the instruments as well.

Only life suffered can transform a symphony from a collection of notes into a message of humanity.

The Chicago Symphony is considered the greatest orchestra in the world.

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.

[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.

I don't see myself necessarily having a burning desire to write a symphony.

Im like any other composer. If you give me five years to write a symphony, Im still going to be asking for more time two days before its due.

Composers love to write for symphony orchestras because the symphony is the Rolls Royce of musical instruments.

Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.

The joy of working with the Chicago Symphony was immeasureable.

The first reason for starting to do the symphony concerts was to play this new piece of mine.

Dance is the music of our body, sound is the rhythm of our feeling, silence is the symphony of our soul.

The director is a bit analogous to the conductor of a symphony orchestra. It's a collaborative adventure.

It feels like my job is to support people. I support great artists. When I worked with a symphony, I sat in the third chair, not the first chair.

The nearer I approach the end, the plainer I hear around me the immortal symphonies of the worlds which invite me. It is marvelous, yet simple.

It is still true that it is easier to compose a poem in the form of a manual for adjusting a VCR than it is to write a piece using just tuning as a symphony.

Making a garden is somehow like conducting a symphony - different plants come forward at different times and you need to think very carefully about their placement in relation to each other.

I would never have become music director of the Chicago Symphony, which would have been an extremely sad loss.

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.

The Russian composers, especially, tricked the symphony orchestra into the kind of dynamic, rhythmic thing

We must realize our own talents and, having realized, accept them; and play on them like a symphony in which all other instruments are harmonized to make a better universe.

And at the same time, I had my very first concert at the age of 16. I hadn't heard a symphony orchestra before, and I was so deeply impressed I said I have to be a conductor.

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

Most Beethoven symphonies require 80 or more instruments, and the late romantics even more.

Remember Haydn's 104 symphonies. Not all of them were great. But there were 104 of them.

My symphonies would have reached Opus 100 if I had but written them down... Sometimes I am so full of music, and so overflowing with melody, that I find it simply impossible to write down anything.

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.

Empires fall, ids explode, great symphonies are written, and behind all of it is a single instinct that demands satisfaction.

I attempt to compose symphonies, although it is clear to me that logically it is pointless.

In a purely technical sense, each species of higher organism-beetle, moss, and so forth, is richer in information than a Caravaggio painting, Mozart symphony, or any other great work of art.

And over the last ten years, after my work with the Brodsky Quartet, I had the opportunity to write arrangements for chamber group, chamber orchestra, jazz orchestra, symphony orchestra even.

Muti is going to do the Alpine Symphony this year. He will do it well because it is not very well known.

All these tales of people sitting down and composing symphonies just as though they were writing a letter are very much exaggerated; at least, it isn't that way in my work.

The very day I purchased it, I christened my guitar as my monophonic symphony, six string orchestra.

Look for the music on all things, and life will be a symphony of joy. My music is best understood by children and animals.

A man must pay the fiddler. In my case it so happened that a whole symphony orchestra often had to be subsidized.

Through the open door A drowsy smell of flowers -grey heliotrope And white sweet clover, and shy mignonette Comes fairly in, and silent chorus leads To the pervading symphony of Peace.

A novel is really like a symphony where instrument after instrument has to come in at its own time, and no other.

When one woman was asked how long she had been going to symphony concerts, she paused to calculate and replied, 'Forty-seven years - and I find I mind it less and less.

I think there's a poet who wrote once a tragedy by Shakespeare, a symphony by Beethoven and a thunderstorm are based on the same elements. I think that's a beautiful line.

If Words are the Lyrics, and Laughter the Melody, then a Relationship becomes a Symphony.

Each day for me is a musical note that I use to compose the symphony of my life.

If we turn to the divine Conductor and follow the wise and loving baton that is His will, His Word, then the music of our life will be a symphony.

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.

If a young man at the age of twenty-three can write a symphony like that, in five years he will be ready to commit murder.

I used to think that running an organization was equivalent to conducting a symphony orchestra. But I don't think that's quite it; it's more like jazz. There is more improvisation.