Best 115 quotes in «orchestra quotes» category

The Prince stood beside the timpanist to count his rests for him and see that he came in in the right place. I suppressed all the trumpet passages which were clearly beyond the players' grasp. The solitary trombone was left to his own devices; but as he wisely confined himself to the notes with which he was thoroughly familiar, such as A flat, D and F, and was careful to avoid all others, his success in the role was almost entirely a silent one.

The world is an orchestra, the universe is a symphony.

Violists hate it when we violinists crack viola jokes.

When a group of people sing together, we make up a chorus. When birds do, it's more like a whole symphony orchestra.

Usually, the murmur that rises up from Paris by day is the city talking; in the night it is the city breathing; but here it is the city singing. Listen, then, to this chorus of bell-towers - diffuse over the whole the murmur of half a million people - the eternal lament of the river - the endless sighing of the wind - the grave and distant quartet of the four forests placed upon the hills, in the distance, like immense organpipes - extinguish to a half light all in the central chime that would otherwise be too harsh or too shrill; and then say whetehr you know of anything in the world more rich, more joyous, more golden, more dazzling, than this tumult of bells and chimes - this furnace of music - these thousands of brazen voices, all singing together in flutes of stone three hundred feet high, than this city which is but one orchestra - this symphony which roars like a tempest.

A conductor should reconcile himself to the realization that regardless of his approach or temperament the eventual result is the same-the orchestra will hate him.

Accelerando means in tempo. Don't rush.

A musical audience is at best uninspiring, at worst definitely drab. ... Respectability hangs like a pall over the orchestra and the boxes; a sort of sterile sobriety ill-fitted to the passionate geometry of music.

Acting is just playing the violin in an orchestra. Directing is being the conductor.

Actors want to work with you but they want you to do their thing. Actors, whom I love with a blind partiality, sometimes they want to be soloists in the symphony, not a part of the orchestra.

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.

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

At a rehearsal I let the orchestra play as they like. At the concert I make them play as I like.

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.

An orchestra knows during the first two minutes of the first rehearsal whether or not they are going to enjoy the person on the podium.

Danzon is my favorite Cuban music, played by a traditional string orchestra with flute and piano. It's very formally structured but romantic music, which derives from the French-Haitian contradance.

Beauty and fullness of tone can be achieved by having the whole orchestra play with high clarinets and a carefully selected number of piccolos.

Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra, not choreography to the audience.

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

Did you play? It sounded very good.

During the rests - pray.

Except for the violin pieces and a few of my orchestra pieces, all of my works from the Passacaglia on relate to the death of my mother.

Eventually we want to do a puppet musical with turntables in the orchestra pit.

How could you have a soccer team if all were goalkeepers? How would it be an orchestra if all were French horns?

His style has the desperate jauntiness of an orchestra fiddling away for dear life on a sinking ship.

For an instant God opens his door and His orchestra plays the Fifth Symphony.

For better or worse, you must play your own little instrument in the orchestra of life.

I don't walk on stage unless I'm playing with a orchestra. But when I play a recital, I'm sort of on a scooter, and I just scoot very quickly on stage, and they're saying, wow, look at this. He's so fast.

I can go in front of an orchestra. I can go in front of an audience. But if you see me walking through an audience in the reception or through a lot of people, I'm still shy.

I did the one concert, and I was not bitten by the conducting bug, and I thought I was done, but then the phone started to ring, and gradually, over time, I started conducting more and more. Now a third of my performances are with orchestras.

I can see none of you are smugglers; that's why it's so loud.

I don't get into politics, general or musical, but just call me if you get jury duty. Even in New Jersey I was able to help somebody.

I don't mind conducting the orchestra if I can play the violin.

I don't want somebody who writes like me [in my writing staff]. Because I can write like me. I know what I'm capable of and what my limitations are. If you're going to build an orchestra, you don't want all tubas - you want a violin and you want a cello and you want a drum set.

I'm a geek and I'm a nerd, and I can listen into any piece of music. I think, I can usually tell you what orchestra it was, I can usually tell you what hall it was in. I can tell you, obviously who the conductor was, and who the composer was.

I hope always to be busy, even if only directing an orchestra in the pit. However, I should prefer to produce movies or be the directing head of a radio corporation.

I grew up in an era where an orchestra was like a treasure chest.

I just remember standing there, singing with the headphones on and the strings playing, just how wonderful that felt. But we so rarely got to go out and do it. Obviously, we don't carry a 70-80-piece orchestra with us when we do shows.

I'm just not arbitrarily choosing to have five guitars play one type of thing. In that way there's a definite similarity between a symphony orchestra and the 100 guitar symphony.

I'm happy to have interns at The Weekly Standard and happy to have readers of The Weekly Standard, but if you all tell me that you were busy reading Plato and [Lev] Tolstoy and playing violin in the orchestra, I'd say that was great. I wouldn't tell you to take time out from that to get involved in political journalism.

I often conduct an orchestra in my sleep; my orchestras are so huge that the back desks of the violas vanish into the horizon. And everything is so wonderful.

I'm more authoritarian with the orchestras than I used to be. You need to hold your ground, I've noticed, or you'll be swept aside.

I'm not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.

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.

In or orchestra we have many nationalities, types, and temperaments.

I often think of random melodies. And I pretty much hear in my head what I want to do with the orchestra as I'm writing on the piano.

It's like a whole orchestra, the piano for me. And also it's to me the greatest instrument. I shouldn't say that, but I believe that this is the only instrument I can really feel happy about playing.

I really love performing with an orchestra and am very excited to do so with the Kalamazoo Symphony.

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.

Its just that, when the orchestra look at me, I want them to see a completely involved person who reflects what we rehearsed, and whose function is to make it possible for them to do it.