Symphony Quotes - Page 10

Mozart, striving for perfection, wrote the same symphony forty-one times. In his case, it worked. He wrote a perfect symphony.

So long as we refuse to include lottery tickets among the symphonies, or medical bulletins among the overtures, we must refrain from treating the emotions as an aesthetic monopoly of music in general or a certain piece of music in particular.

Now I'm having the time of my life being on the road with one of the world's all-time great big bands, and performing with symphonies. I wouldn't trade it for anything.

What I'm going for with the string arrangements for my Antarctic symphony is a pun here.

Antarctic symphony has a geometric relationship to the landscape. It's saying that this landscape and the minimal kind of, you know I'm talking like seeing ice, is visually kind of eerily minimal.

On one hand you have a string quartet, which is not a symphony. On the other hand is you have me sampling them and making it sound like there is many more people playing, so the whole notion of, kind of, sampling applied to classical music is very intriguing to me because composers throughout history have borrowed motifs and quotes from one another.

Geography is crucial for my work. I went to Antarctica and took a studio to several of the main ice fields to make field recordings of ice to create a symphony - acoustic portraits of ice.

Life is everywhere. The earth is throbbing with it - it's like music. The plants, the creatures, the ones we see, the ones we don't see, it's like one, big, pulsating symphony.

Our biological rhythms are the symphony of the cosmos.

Abolishing the book is like abolishing the symphony, or sonata form, or the sonnet, or the wall painting.

It's a fundamental, social attitude that the 1% supports symphonies and operas and doesn't support Johnny learning to program hip-hop beats. When I put it like that, it sounds like, 'Well, yeah,' but you start to think, 'Why not, though?' What makes one more valuable than another?

Why learn a number like pi to so many decimal places? The answer I gave then as I do now is that pi is for me an extremely beautiful and utterly unique thing. Like the Mona Lisa or a Mozart symphony, pi is its own reason for loving it.

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

Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be vulgarity - like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day.

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 I listen to a symphony I love, I don't get from it what the composer got. His 'Yes' was different from mine. He could have no concern for mine and no exact conception of it. That answer is too personal to each man. But in giving himself what he wanted, he gave me a great experience.

When I do an operation, it's half a dozen people. When it goes beautifully, it's like a symphony, with everybody playing their part.

To be part of Kevin's [Drew] world, "Who Came First" is just kind of a magical symphony. If you're asking me what that emotional timbre what is my favorite, my favorite "why" is the question. The other songs also have a revealing quality, but it started with "Sister OK".

I think that of my 21 symphonies, each has its own place.

I hear entire symphonies, oratorios, in my head, but I can't write a note.