Symphony Quotes

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.

You can't play a symphony alone, it takes an orchestra to play it.

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.

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

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

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

In South America, I heard the 8th Symphony of Beethoven. And the young conductor thought, Beethoven must be heroic. But this is piece which shouldn't be heroic. And this was such a misunderstanding, such a deep misunderstanding.

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.

When we're at the end of The Rite of Spring or of a Bruckner symphony, I want people to feel the music physically.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 must be like the world. It must contain everything.

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

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.

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.

A symphony is no joke.

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

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

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