If you're alive, you have all the experience necessary to understand classical music.

Being a conductor is kind of a hybrid profession because most fundamentally, it is being someone who is a coach, a trainer, an editor, a director.

If you're curious, if you have a capacity for wonder, if you're alive, you know all that you need to know [about music].

Classical music is an unbroken, living tradition that goes back over 1,000 years, and every one of those years has had something unique and powerful to say to us about what it's like to be alive.

The big difference between human happiness and sadness? Thirty-seven freakin' vibrations.

You can't have Bach, Mozart and Beethoven as your favorite composers. They simply define what music is!

Classical music is a wonderful 1200 year-old tradition that witnesses everything that it has meant and what it means right now to be human.

The whole path of American music has been so much about the recognition of stylistic diversity, and the recognition of the importance of music which was from one of the vernacular traditions.

I think music needs to be presented in a way so that kids can grasp songs, dances, simple music that's associated with some particular defining moment in human experience.

When I first was conducting as guest conductor in Europe 25 years ago, I would propose doing American pieces and grudgingly it would be accepted from time to time.

Extreme volume in music very often disguises a lack of actually important content.

It's none of their business that you have to learn how to write. Let them think you were born that way.

This is cooperation [with Hezbollah, Iran , from Russia], I don't know what you mean by support. We have cooperation with countries for decades. Why talk about this cooperation now ?

Only in math can you buy sixty cantaloupes and no one asks what the hell is wrong with you.

It's very odd, being older, because in a way it's hard to own the past, even.

You can't get work without working.

By elimination, dishonesty is the second-best policy.

We know that men and women can be good without faith. We know that.

White and scrubbed, antique brass fixtures and a skylight letting in a flood of sunshine. Wow. You could get a tan standing around in the shower, for Christ's sake.

Since the advent of Benny Goodman, there have been too few clarinetists to fill the void that Goodman left. Ken Peplowski is most certainly one of those few. The man is magic.

I will accept no commission that would tend to create a rivalry with Grant. I want him to hold what he has earned and got. I have all the rank I want.