Symphony Quotes

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

When you hear a large symphony orchestra. for instance, in a concert hall, there's a big, sweeping sound that just doesn't get on to a record.

While our country has made great strides in breaking down the barriers which for so long denied equal opportunity to all Americans, we are not yet the beautiful symphony of brotherhood of Dr. King's dream.

I've worked with actors before where I was like, this is not working, and then I've seen their work on the screen and I've been like, Wow, that was a really great performance. Because there are a lot of elements with film. It's not like stage. It's not a kind of performance art anymore; it's a highly tuned kind of collaboration - a symphony.

For hundreds of years people have talked about artists having inspiration, but often, some persons would say, write us a symphony or write us a song, on commission. The artists would come up with a masterpiece without waiting to have their muse inspire them.

New Year's Eve, we're going to be doing a concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra in Symphony Hall. It makes me feel good, because of all the people they could have had, they wanted me! We do have to do a little work with the rhythm section.

A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.

I learned from my uncle that jazz, like symphony music, was built to last.

Mozart has written opera, symphony, sacred and chamber music - not to mention his piano and violin concerti.

To have everything written for you... It's not really creating. That's why I think symphony drummers are so limited. They 're limited to exactly what was played a hundred years before them by a thousand other drummers.

A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything.

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.

I've been playing music all my life, from being a choir soloist at Symphony Hall as a youngster to playing in bands through high school and college at Kent State. Went in the service at 17, out before I was 21.

We are each but a quarter note in a grand symphony.

It was really amazing. I mean, he'd never mentioned that he played in the symphony, like serious violin playing, not fiddle playing. And he just blew us away.

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

God comes to us in theater in the way we communicate with each other, whether it be a symphony orchestra, or a wonderful ballet, or a beautiful painting, or a play. It's a way of expressing our humanity.

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

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.

A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.

But a large symphony orchestra basically is a repertory company and it has a very enormous repertoire and it is important for the performers to be able to know how to shift focus so that they instantly become part of the sound world that a particular repertoire demands.

Coming to understand a painting or a symphony in an unfamiliar style, to recognize the work of an artist or school, to see or hear in new ways, is as cognitive an achievement as learning to read or write or add.

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.

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.

Everything will pass, and the world will perish but the Ninth Symphony will remain.

My show business career doesn't mean I can't write a symphony. It just means I was never asked to write one.

A symphony is no joke.

If he's a true symphony artist, he knows better than that because he knows that the only truly creative musician is the jazz musician.

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

When the bright angel dominates, out comes a great work of art, a Michelangelo David or a Beethoven symphony.