154 quotes found
"Compatibility, not incompatibility, is the issue. For pc set 'analysis' is incompatible with nothing, as the fact of its universal potential applicability already testifies. It begins not with observation of musical particularities but with a universe of possibilities. The comparison of any musical entity with such a universe yields an inexhaustible quarry of 'true facts' but no criterion of relevance. As long as not such criterion has been established… the endless stream of ostensible relations stemming from the pc survey can persuade us for a while that analysis is being accomplished. But in fact it is only a tabulation that can just as well be carried on in the presense of analysis as in its absence (hence the universal 'compatibility'). Nor is it really so innocuous as I may be making it seem, since in its anodyne effect (one never comes back from the fishing expedition empty-handed, there is always 'something to say' some 'finding' to report) it can deflect attention away from the task at hand, which is to formulate analytical methods, not concoct a universal solvent."
"The nice thing about an -ism, someone once observed, is how quickly it becomes a wasm. Some musical wasms—academic-wasm, for example, and its dependent varieties of modern-wasm and Serial-wasm—continue to linger on artificial life support, thought, and continue to threaten the increasingly fragile classical ecosystem.""
"So much of what we do is ephemeral and quickly forgotten, even by ourselves, so it's gratifying to have something you have done linger in people's memories."
"There’s a very basic human, non-verbal aspect to our need to make music and use it as part of our human expression. It doesn’t have to do with body movements, it doesn't have to do with articulation of a language, but with something spiritual."
"I hadn't heard of either disco or Meco. When I was asked to listen to Meco's now-famous recording, I was a little apprehensive, wondering how a pop record could be made from "The March from Star Wars" and what it would be like. I immediately liked what I heard and sensed that a genuine communication was taking place. Meco took things forward another step by bringing Star Wars to a vast audience who otherwise would not have heard it in its original symphonic setting. I am most grateful to Meco for all of this and I am delighted that 'disco' and 'Meco' are now household words."
"Leroy Anderson is an American original - direct, honest, personal, idiosyncratic, and free of pretension. His music is directed to, and reflective of, the American soul."
"Without John Williams, bikes don’t really fly, nor do brooms in Quidditch matches, nor do men in red capes. There is no Force, dinosaurs do not walk the Earth, we do not wonder, we do not weep, we do not believe."
"It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)."
"I think of music sometimes in terms of color [...] and [in a furnace] I like to see the flames licking yellow in the dark and then pulsing down to a kind of red glow."
"[Sights enabling musical inspiration] The memory of things gone is important to a jazz musician [...] Things like the old folks singing in the moonlight in the back yard on a hot night, or something someone said long ago. I remember I once wrote a sixty-four-bar piece about a memory of when I was a little boy in bed and heard a man whistling on the street outside, his footsteps echoing away. Things like these may be more important to a musician than technique."
"As Bach says [...] if you ain't got a left hand, you ain't worth a hoot in hell."
"[Expressing a liking for trains] Folks can't rush you until you get off."
"You can't write music right [...] until you know how the man that'll play it plays poker."
"[Y]ou've got to write with certain men in mind. You write just for their abilities and natural tendencies and give them places where they do their best—certain entrances and background stuff. You got to know each man to know what he'll react well to. One guy likes very simple ornamentation; another guy likes ornamentation better than the theme because it gives him a feeling of being a second mind. Every musician has his favorite licks and you gotta write to them."
"I know what sounds well on a trombone and I know what sounds well on a trumpet and they are not the same. [...] I know what Tricky Sam can play on a trombone and I know what Lawrence Brown can play on a trombone and they are not the same either."
"My band is my instrument more than the piano."
"Playing "Bop" is like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing."
"[Asked about the vogue for Rock 'n' Roll and calypso] [N]o matter what you call it, music is as good as it sounds. Music is an oral art. Until you hear it, it is not music and if it sounds good it is good."
"The piano players were very important in the early days, and the great piano players were always on the East Coast; there never was anybody in the West who could play two notes. (By West I mean ; in those days there was no other West to speak of, west of that.) , who was mainly a writer and had more music published than anyone else, played piano like one of those high school teachers in Washington; as a matter of fact, high school teachers played better jazz. Among other things, his rhythm was unsteady; but that's the kind of piano the West was geared up to. On the other hand, the piano players on the East Coast did the most impossible things. If you dig up the early piano rolls or records by , you will hear the most beautiful and perfect performances. was a giant of those days, too. It is one of my great regrets that when the Lion used to come up to my house I didn't have a recording machine so that I could preserve some of those early performances of his."
"It's like an act of murder; you play with intent to commit something."
"There are simply two kinds of music, good music and the other kind ... the only yardstick by which the result should be judged is simply that of how it sounds. If it sounds good it's successful; if it doesn't it has failed."
"Every man prays in his own language."
"How can anyone expect to be understood unless he presents his thoughts with complete honesty? This situation is unfair because it asks too much of the world. In effect, we say, "I don't dare show you what I am because I don't trust you for a minute but please love me anyway because I so need you to. And, of course, if you don't love me anyway, you're a dirty dog, just as I suspected, so I was right in the first place." Yet, every time God's children have thrown away fear in pursuit of honesty-trying to communicate themselves, understood or not, miracles have happened."
"Fate is being kind to me. [...] Fate doesn’t want me to be too famous too young."
"[Asked about his "fate doesn’t want me to be too famous too young" comment] What else could I have said? [...] In the first place, I never do give any thought to prizes. I work and I write, and that's it. My reward is hearing what I have done, and unlike most composers, I can hear it immediately. That's why I keep these expensive gentlemen with me. And secondly, I'm hardly surprised that my kind of music is still without, let us say, official honor at home. Most Americans still take it for granted that European music–classical music, if you will–is the only really respectable kind. I remember, for example when Franklin Roosevelt died, practically no American music was played on the air in tribute to him. We were given a dispensation, I must admit. We did one radio program dedicated to him. But by and large, then as now, jazz was the kind of man you wouldn't want your daughter to associate with. The word 'jazz' has been part of the problem [...] It never lost its association with those New Orleans bordellos. In the nineteen-twenties, I used to try to convince Fletcher Henderson that we ought to call what we were doing "negro music". But it's too late for that now. The music has become so integrated you can't tell one part from the other as far as color is concerned. Well, I don't have time time to worry about it. I've got too much music on my mind."
"Roaming through the jungle of "oohs" and "ahs," searching for a more agreeable noise, I live a life of primitivity with the mind of a child and an unquenchable thirst for sharps and flats."
"Louis Armstrong was on J-and never got off his J-never, never stopped. I mean for all intents and purposes, died with his trumpet in his hand. So did Duke Ellington, all those people who inspire one, who inspire me. Duke was still going on the road right up till the last. Louis Armstrong still on the road till the very last. I appreciate that, I respect it and I am grateful for it. I am grateful, in the name of my grandson I am grateful."
"Of course anything that Duke does I like. He just seems to have a sixth sense about things turning out so good ... But I especially like the marriage between strings and what he did with the band. He didn't confine the strings to just whole notes and half notes, which most guys do, but he gave them little pizzicato things and little staccato things in there, which works out beautifully ...."
"Well, that's about the quintessence of slick, professional, expert, boring arrangement. I couldn't say offhand who it was. As I say, I haven't heard jazz for a year. I found it dull—the last word in polish and professionality [sic]—but dull."
"That's wild! I'll start off with five stars and work backwards from there. Now there, to me, is the most perfect band in existence, whether you're thinking of it orchestrationally or in terms of Duke's immensely creative writing. I can't think of anybody I admire more than this man; nobody could even be compared with him, except Billy Strayhorn. Duke does something with this old, tired instrumentation of trumpets, trombones and saxophones, and he has a perfect way of utilizing the men's specific sounds. Anything he plays is a work of art. The band is out of tune, for instance, and it doesn't even matter. They almost have their own brand of intonation. Duke can take an exotic-sounding idea and create something – you might call it sophisticated crudity. It gives both the qualities that I look for – an earthy quality and the sophisticated quality."
"Since jazz is usually celebrated as an improvisor’s art, it may seem paradoxical that one of its major figures was a composer. Though Duke Ellington was a notable pianist, he declared, ‘My band is my instrument,’ and for over half a century he made it the medium of a peerless body of work. For Ellington, composition was never an abstract process, but a direct response to people and situations. He once said, ‘I see something and want to make a tone parallel,’ and the titles of his works are a catalogue of incidents, encounters and atmospheres. ‘Haunted Nights’, ‘The Mooche’, ‘Daybreak Express’, ‘Black, Brown and Beige’ – every Ellington piece enshrines a life in motion, pursued with spontaneity. And Ellington’s lifelong companions were the members of his band – among them the gutbucket growls of trumpeters Bubber Miley and Cootie Williams, the arching sensuousness of altoist Johnny Hodges and the rumbling majesty of Harry Carney’s baritone. As individual and sometimes contrary a set of virtuosos as ever shared a bandstand, he composed with these sounds and personalities in his head, writing specifically for them. And they provided the raw material for his astonishing originality in harmony and orchestration. To many, Ellington may have been known for such lush popular hits as ‘Sophisticated Lady’, but his colleagues recognised an attainment of another order. As Miles Davis put it, ‘Some day all the jazz musicians should get together in one place and go down on their knees and thank Duke.’"
"I admit it worked fairly well but my first reaction was to get up and walk away from the job, but I couldn't. Once you've heard music like that with the picture, it makes your own scoring more difficult to arrive at, it clouds your thinking. Later, as an inside joke, I included a snippet of the Strauss in the score-and some critic pounced on me for stealing. You can´t win."
"The fact that certain composers have been able to create first-class music within the medium of film proves that film music can be as good as the composer is gifted."
"Working to timings and synchronizing your musical thoughts with the film can be stimulating rather than restrictive. Scoring is a limitation but like any limitation is can be made to work for you. Verdi, except for a handful of pieces, worked best when he was 'turned on' by a libretto. The most difficult problem in music is form, and in a film you already have this problem solved for you. You are presented with a basic structure, and a blueprint, and provided the film has been well put together, and well edited, it often suggests its rhythms and tempo. The quality of the music is strictly up to the composer. Many people seem to assume that because film music serves the visual it must be something of secondary value. Well, the function of any art is to serve a purpose in society. For many years, music and painting served religion. The thing to bear in mind is that film is the youngest of the arts, and that scoring is the youngest of the music arts. We have a great deal of development ahead of us."
"You read reviews by top reviewers of films that not only had remarkably interesting scores, but films whose effectiveness was absolutely enhanced, and frequently created by the music, yet the reviewers seem unaware that their emotions and their nervous reactions to the films have been affected by the scoring. This is a serious flaw. Any film reviewer owes it to himself, and the public, to take every element of the film into account"
"It's nice to think about the Golden Age of Hollywood, with the big studios and their fabulous music departments and the hundreds of films coming out every year. But it's gone. In some ways the composer today is more fortunate, provided he can find a good film, because he can attempt more than he could two decades ago. Twelve-tone music was unheard of during Max Steiner's heyday, as were any other avant-garde techniques. Finally, the future of film music rests with the composers themselves. If they take their work seriously and turn out the best that is within them, then perhaps we can persuade not only the public, but the filmmakers that good music is valuable in films. The public is not stupid. If our music survives, which I have no doubt it will, then it will be because it is good."
"Originally I was supposed to do Grand Prix, but I was under contract to 20th Century Fox at that time and Alex North was supposed to do Sand Pebbles, but he got sick, so Fox preempted me out of Grand Prix, and to my good fortune, I got to do Sand Pebbles. It was my first time working with Robert Wise and it was a great experience."
"Jerry Goldsmith is an artist who meets all the demands upon the composer in films. He communicates, integrates, subordinates, supports, and designs with discipline."
"I sat reading in these chairs and felt somehow, in an abstract rather than a religious way, that suffering shapes you. Not only my own religious thought, but that of my ancestors, affected me in some way. The thing we have as Jews is that it’s a wonderfully abstract religion. Images are not allowed, so it’s welcome to abstract thought."
"I wouldn’t play it in public — you need different muscles, you can’t use the upper arm, just the fingers. But the sound has a glow, because the strings aren’t damped, as on a piano. I wanted to visit Bach’s sound world, then apply those ideas to the piano."
"In the Bronx, we had three synagogues on one block at 161st Street. My father was Orthodox and we went to the Sephardi one. Further along was the Conservative, the biggest. In between was the Ashkenazi shul. And guess who was their shabbos goy? Colin Powell!"
"I’m deeply grateful to be Jewish. I feel it’s enriched my life and I feel very strongly about Jewishness."
"A liberal is a man or a woman or a child who looks forward to a better day, a more tranquil night, and a bright, infinite future."
"The Rhapsody is not a composition at all. It's a string of separate paragraphs stuck together — with a thin paste of flour and water… I don’t think there has been such an inspired melodist on this earth since Tchaikovsky… but if you want to speak of a composer, that's another matter."
"Any great work of art … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world — the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air."
"The trouble with you and me, Ned, is that we want everyone in the world to personally love us, and of course that's impossible; you just don't meet everyone in the world."
"To Bach, notes were not just sounds but the very stuff of creation."
"Callas? She was pure electricity."
"Einstein said that "the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious." So why do so many of us try to explain the beauty of music, thus depriving it of its mystery?"
"The 20th century has been a badly written drama, from the beginning. The opposite of a Greek drama. Act one: Greed and hypocrisy leading to a genocidal world war, a boom, a crash, totalitarianism. Act two: Greed and hypocrisy leading to a genocidal world war, a boom, a crash, totalitarianism. Act three: Greed and hypocrisy … I don't dare continue."
"Perhaps the chief requirement of [the conductor] is that he be humble before the composer; that he never interpose himself between the music and the audience; that all his efforts, however strenuous or glamorous, be made in the service of the composer's meaning - the music itself, which, after all, is the whole reason for the conductor's existence.""
"Bernstein has been disclosing musical secrets that have been well known for over 400 years."
"Today, he uses music as an accompaniment to his conducting."
"It was hard not to pay attention to Lenny, who made sure that was always the case by always being fascinating."
"Somewhere there's a happy harbor far from the storm. Out where the sun shines there is someone I'm meant to adore, and I know the day I find her, I'll smile once more."
"I knew I was doing things different but at the same time I was doing things that were very natural for me … I wasn’t trying to break any rules. But I wrote the way I heard things."
"If, as is nearly always the case, music appears to express something, this is only an illusion,and not a reality."
"In fact the hardest part is trying to forget music when I'm not conducting it."
"I don't want to be conducting Mahler with my head stuffed full of 10 million notes from other composers."
"I come to a performance of music that I know very well as if I were performing it for the first time. Every day is a new day, a new experience. This is the way I approach a masterpiece. A masterpiece can never age - it's only the people who perform it or listen to it who become insensitive to it. If you come with a fresh feeling toward a masterpiece, it will always feel fresh and give you the benefit of its genius."
"Obliged to find an apartment of their own, my parents searched the neighbourhood and chose one within walking distance of the park. Showing them out after they had viewed it, the landlady said: "And you'll be glad to know I don't take Jews." Her mistake made clear to her, the antisemitic landlady was renounced, and another apartment found. But her blunder left its mark. Back on the street my mother made a vow. Her unborn baby would have a label proclaiming his race to the world. He would be called "The Jew" [Yehudi]."
"This wasteful governing by fear, by contempt for the basic dignities of life, this steady asphyxiation of a dependent people, should be the very last means to be adopted by those who themselves know too well the awful significance, the unforgettable suffering of such an existence. It is unworthy of my great people, the Jews, who have striven to abide by a code of moral rectitude for some 5,000 years, who can create and achieve a society for themselves such as we see around us but can yet deny the sharing of its great qualities and benefits to those dwelling amongst them."
"Actually, I was gazing in my usual state of being half absent in my own world and half in the present. I have usually been able to 'retire' in this way. I was also thinking that my life was tied up with the instrument and would I do it justice?"
"Music creates order out of chaos: for rhythm imposes unanimity upon the divergent, melody imposes continuity upon the disjointed, and harmony imposes compatibility upon the incongruous."
"The violinist is that peculiarly human phenomenon distilled to a rare potency - half tiger, half poet."
"To play great music, you must keep your eyes on a distant star."
"I can only think of music as something inherent in every human being - a birthright. Music coordinates mind, body and spirit."
"The violinist must possess the poet's gift of piercing the protective hide which grows on propagandists, stockbrokers and slave traders, to penetrate the deeper truth which lies within."
"I would hate to think I am not an amateur. An amateur is one who loves what he is doing. Very often, I'm afraid, the professional hates what he is doing. So, I'd rather be an amateur."
"We embark unhesitatingly on the path, in a direction that is absolutely right and urgent, supported by everyone, in the knowledge that this path is but a learning process... We have to keep on learning, creating, applying, by-passing, touching upon, refining and clarifying a number of notions and details that need to be improvised and applied and which, thank God, we cannot foresee. The only rigidity lies in our will, our conviction that we are on the right road and that our initiatives are most pressing."
"Peace may sound simple — one beautiful word — but it requires everything we have, every quality, every strength, every dream, every high ideal."
"The art of creation lies in the gift of perceiving the particular and generalizing it, thus creating the particular again. It is therefore a powerful transforming force and a generator of creative solutions in relation to a given problem. It is the currency of human exchanges, which enables the sharing of states of the soul and conscience, and the discovery of new fields of experience."
"What guides us is children's response, their joy in learning to dance, to sing, to live together. It should be a guide to the whole world."
"Each human being has the eternal duty of transforming what is hard and brutal into a subtle and tender offering, what is crude into refinement, what is ugly into beauty, ignorance into knowledge, confrontation into collaboration, thereby rediscovering the child’s dream of a creative reality incessantly renewed by death, the servant of life, and by life the servant of love."
"Homeopathy is the safest and more reliable approach to ailments and has withstood the assaults of established medical practice for over 100 years."
"There were other gurus and other lessons, but not until I met Iyengar did I take up the study regularly. My first meeting with him was like the casting of a spell. We made each other's acquaintance in Mumbai. He appeared in my rooms one morning and straightaway made it clear that the "audition" to follow was mine as much as his. For all my celebrity, to him I was just another Western body knotted through and through."
"First and foremost, yoga made its contribution to my quest to understand consciously the mechanics of violin playing, a quest which by 1951 had long been one of the themes of my life. All influences pointed to less tension, more effective application of energy, the breaking down of resistance in every joint, the coordination of all motions into one motion; and illustrated the profound truth that strength comes not from strength but from the subtle comprehension of process, proportion and balance."
"We in the Western world have grown to understand matter as imprisoned light, and light as liberated matter, yet this has had no influence on our spiritual thought. In practical terms it only led to the creation of the atom bomb."
"When I was a boy no one seemed to ask where the energies come from. Land, oil, coal, air seemed inexhaustible. Now we are realizing how our very life depends upon restoring not only our balance with nature, but also that balance within ourselves. We are depleting our reserves of spirit, health, courage and faith at an alarming rate. The quiet practice of yoga is, in its humble yet effective way, an antidote."
"That India should offer me at once a homeland and a new-found land with lasting power to astonish seemed only right, for it is precisely the reconciling of contradictions Within an all-accepting unity that is the country's genius and its abiding appeal to me. India, I feel, has softened my Talmudical adjudications between right and wrong, upheld innocent acceptance of the lovely things of life, given me much that was new yet welcome, understandable, waiting to experienced."
"Despite predisposition in India's favor, I have to acknowledge that Indian music took me by surprise. I knew neither its nature nor its richness, but here, if anywhere, I found vindication of my conviction that India was the original source."
"I've had marvelous and incredible luck, and devoted parents, sisters, friends, and teachers. What more can one ask? These things contribute enormously. Probably the major part of one's success is due to these factors."
"Why is compassion not part of our established curriculum, an inherent part of our education? Compassion, awe, wonder, curiosity, exaltation, humility — these are the very foundation of any real civilization, no longer the prerogatives, the preserves of any one church, but belonging to everyone, every child in every home, in every school."
"Working with no other orchestra gave me as much satisfaction as my work, as soloist and conductor, with the Sinfonia Varsovia Orchestra."
"It was a true inspiration to spend as much time with them [Sinfonia Varsovia] as possible, to enjoy the deep satisfaction I derive from our music-making together."
"Many people do not realise that it takes considerably more art and skill to play the violin lightly than it does to play it loudly. Indeed, the best possible training for young violinists is learning to play pianissimo and without pressure."
"In playing Beethoven the violinist should be a medium. There is little that is personal or that can be reduced to ingratiating sounds, pleasing slides and so on. Everything is dictated by the significance, the weight, structure and direction of the notes and passages themselves."
"It is absolutely vital to hold it as lightly as possible - rather as one might pick up a newborn bird."
"One should feel in the right arm the vibration of the bow hair on the strings. [...] The moment tension or hardness enters into the hand then of course the vibrations will not be felt- they cannot penetrate."
"Learning an imposed method seemed not in my nature"
"What fascinated my imagination was the tremendous feat, which I felt I should be perfectly able to accomplish."
"[At age 7] In eight hours of concentrated practice between my twice-weekly lessons, I memorized the A major and played it for Persinger."
"To be an outstanding musician, you have to be very attentive to the smallest detail and willing to have infinite patience in the pursuit of your ideal."
"Even at the risk of losing all the golden eggs of the future, I had to find out what made the goose lay those eggs"
"Undoubtedly I had lost time in balking at scales, arpeggios. [...] There is an advantage in establishing the top story of one's constructions first: One has seen the heights; one knows what one is building for and what must be sustained."
"The best teacher is the one who himself has had to struggle to learn."
"I imagine that whatever contribution I can make to teaching derives from having had to rethink and re-create my technique."
"The teacher offers guidance here and there, but the primary factor, the driving force, in your relationship and work together is the student's own commitment and desire to learn. Teaching is like sailing: The wind and the sails give the boat its motion. Your role (as a teacher) is to steer and guide."
"The idea that a pupil is a passive recipient, a container waiting to be filled by the teacher's knowledge and instruction - all this is nonsense. Teaching is a living relationship, of give and take, of mutual learning."
"There comes a time when the student turns his back on the teacher. His playing cannot have the necessary security, autonomy, self-faith, or communicative power until he believes his interpretation is his own."
"This is the best and ultimate purpose of conducting: Not only to lead (the musicians) and keep them together, not only to make their performance easier and simpler, but also to guide them so that they can play as they have always longed to play."
"He was one of the celebrities like author Aldous Huxley who was taught by B. K. S. Iyengar the Iyengar brand of yoga."
"There is... no definitive interpretation for him but the search for repose, for a place where music, far from any pretension, vibrates naturally, where it can breathe more than show off."
"Yehudi Menuhin could play difficult violin pieces by Mozart, Beethoven and Bach at age 7. He played in Carnegie Hall at 11. He was 12 when he made his first record. At 13, he'd played in the finest concert halls in Berlin, London, and Paris. At 19, he embarked on his first world tour – 110 concerts, 63 cities and 13 countries. Yet at 19 he couldn't play a simple A major scale or a basic three-octave arpeggio. And he'd never figured out music theory."
"For young Menuhin, each piece was a goal. Once he heard something he wanted to play, he'd focus his mind on it. He practiced at least four hours daily. When he could play one work perfectly, he simply moved on to the next."
"It wasn't enough to be a great soloist - Menuhin wanted to be a great leader in music. He wanted to teach, open a music school and conduct the world's best musical groups. Menuhin knew that if he wanted to teach a class or lead an orchestra, he couldn't rest on his past achievements. He needed to understand the steps he'd taken to play so well."
"So back to school he went. To nail down the way his fingers moved, Menuhin learned every scale imaginable. He learned to play them at every speed. He searched the library for books on violin technique. He went to the best teachers and asked them to explain things the books didn't say. He asked gymnasts and dancers for advice on the most precise way to move his bowing arm. To understand how to control his bowing better, he learned the names of each muscle in the back, upper arms, forearms and fingers. He studied drawings made by Leonardo da Vinci, so he'd know what hands looked like on the inside. Then Menuhin broke his performance down even more. Studying India's exercise system of yoga, he started to understand his breathing as he played."
"In 1942, Menuhin conducted for the first time. In the years that followed, he led the New York Philharmonic, the London Symphony Orchestra and the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington, D.C., among others. He taught students around the world. He established the Gstaad Festival in Switzerland and directed the Bath Festival in England. In 1963, he founded the world-renowned Yehudi Menuhin School in Stoke D'Aubernon, England. Menuhin became a British subject in 1985, was knighted in 1987 and became a life peer in 1993."
"Although he seemed almost the embodiment of the classical musician who was lost in the spiritual intensity of his art, he, in fact, devoted his 75-year career to a remarkably wide range of musical, humanitarian and even political activities--building cultural bridges that ranged from defying the political climate during the Cold War to a groundbreaking collaboration with Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar in the 1960s."
"The world has lost a great soul, whose passion was music and humanity."
"Yehudi Menuhin was a major figure in this century – an extraordinary musician and a great humanitarian. [...] His style of playing, particularly in his early years, was a stunning patrician elegance with a very natural musical line, which fitted the style of whatever composition."
"Menuhin worked to raise money for UNESCO and lobbied for racial equality in South Africa. He spoke out against narrow political nationalism in any form, including music. Not only did he create a rage for Indian raga music when he released his East Meets West [sic] recording with Shankar, he chipped away at the barriers between classical music and jazz by improvising with jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli."
"Menuhin felt a close kinship with Stern, who also was born of Russian immigrants."
"Despite the adulation that followed him wherever he went, Menuhin's playing began to lose some of its technical brilliance in the 1950s and entered a slow decline. But Menuhin, who often appeared transfixed when he performed, readily made up for what a Times critic described as "thick-toned, raspy playing" with an increased spiritual intensity in his interpretation."
"He was never just a musician, from very early on he wanted to do other things, to make his music work for humanity."
"His musical career spanned more than seven decades. He made his debut in San Francisco as a child prodigy aged seven and by the age of 13, had performed in London, Paris and Berlin. He went on to develop his talents as a violinist, conductor and teacher, founding the Yehudi Menuhin School, in Surrey, for gifted young musicians in 1963. [...] At the age of 16 the young violinist was conducted by Sir Edward (Elgar) in a now famous recording of the composer's violin concerto, made in 1932."
"As well as campaigning for human rights, Menuhin was a keen yoga practitioner and health food enthusiast, warning against the dangers of white rice, white bread and red meat. He also spoke of the dangers of pollution long before environmentalism became a buzz word."
"Now I know there is a God in heaven."
"French music is really very sensory, and appeals to sense of smell, taste, touch. It can be languorous, and almost erotic. Russian music is very subjective, sometimes whiny, breast-beating 'Look how I suffer, look how I suffer!'. German music is, to use your word, metaphysical. It really asks those existential questions of 'How do I relate to the Universe?', 'Is there a heaven?', 'How am I like a brook, or a leaf on a tree?'. I know this was the music that most challenged Schnabel. He said Mozart was the most inaccessible of the great masters, because with the fewest number of notes, he accesses the deepest levels of human awareness and experience."
"There are certain devices that one uses in Romantic music that are appropriate only for Romantic or subsequent music. If you take those devices and apply them to earlier music, then it’s totally inappropriate, and it makes the Classical music sound silly. However, if you were to use what you might call ‘Classical devices’ on Romantic music, historically, that would be correct! It very often benefits Romantic music, which is sometimes rather disjunctive, rather shapeless in comparison with Classical symphonic or sonata form. Romantic music very often benefits from that tighter organization that you get from Classical music."
"Speaking involves inflection, it involves an understanding of the language. Too many young people today play their instruments most wonderfully – they have such command of their instrument – but it’s as though they’re speaking a foreign language, phonetically. They pronounce all the words, but they have no idea of what they’re saying. And I think that’s one of the big differences between the great artists of the time and this level of expertise that is constantly expanding and rising. As I’ve said for a long time, the level of mediocrity is constantly rising."
"First of all, when you enter a conservatory, it’s already too late. The kind of connection that has to be made with an instrument, be it a piano, strings, a wind instrument, it really has to start much younger – five, six, seven - eight years-old is already getting late. The instrument must really become an extension of yourself. That neuromuscular connection between intention and realization is something that really has to be started very young. And the years between nine or ten and twenty, that’s when one should learn the whole repertoire."
"Leroy Anderson was a crossover composer before anyone came up with the term. The voice of Leroy Anderson became the voice of the Boston Pops in its dual commitment to approachability and to excellence."
"You can’t just take kids off the streets, put them in a hall, and expect them to know how to react.... During my first season, while I was conducting a youth concert, one kid went through a plate glass window and two bathrooms were totally destroyed...”"
"My background in music came from me playing drums and piano as a young child. My grandmother was a pianist and I was influenced by her and my parents were playing rock records which influenced my drumming. I was a fan of film scores, rock, classical, jazz, and hip-hop in my early years and tried to learn as much about each of those genres as possible. I began writing music in a serious way in my teen years while I was playing in various bands and orchestras."
"I have an inner gage when I feel it’s too much, then I just don’t do a particular film. I’m lucky that I get more offers than I can possibly take. But I always want the phone to be ringing, because I want to do this for the rest of my life. I don’t plan on slowing down, but I certainly have to say “no” more and more. I consider myself very lucky to make a living at this. It’s almost bizarre for any musician to turn down work as much as they to have to keep themselves sane. I know what my limit is. And I keep myself at that limit."
"My favorite aspect about horror music is you can literally write anything you want. You are limited only by your imagination! In fact, many times the more unique and completely original your music is, the better it works in the game and the more the developer loves it."
"I think any composer is the sum of their life experience, and that's what makes each of them interesting and different."
"When I'm watching a scary movie and there's a shadow or a flicker under the bed, that's scary because the unknown is so much scarier than when, two-thirds of the way through the movie, it's revealed that it's a guy in a mask. Once it becomes tangible and fixed in your mind's eye, it becomes a lot less scary to me and I think music is the same way. If you don't recognize that sound, your brain immediately tells you to run away. It's the shark fin in the water, it's hearing the music and then maybe you see a fin, it's all about the build up to the 'boo' itself and that has been my entire philosophy about horror music from the beginning – how unrecognizable is it going to be?"
"Big breath, chest up!"
"Hit it hard, and wish it well."
"Brass playing is no harder than deep breathing."
"Watch the tongue."
"The air does the work. The tongue channels the pitch."
"Let the air save your lip."
"Let the air do the work."
"Rest as much as you play."
"Lift fingers high, strike valves hard."
"Don't stop where I have, but go further."
"You could have a lip strong enough to lift that piano and still not be able to play a low C!"
"So many superficial aspects of Tár seemed to align with my own personal life. But once I saw it I was no longer concerned, I was offended: I was offended as a woman, I was offended as a conductor, I was offended as a lesbian."
"To have an opportunity to portray a woman in that role and to make her an abuser — for me that was heartbreaking. I think all women and all feminists should be bothered by that kind of depiction because it's not really about women conductors, is it?"
"There are so many men — actual, documented men — this film could have been based on but, instead, it puts a woman in the role but gives her all the attributes of those men. That feels antiwoman. To assume that women will either behave identically to men or become hysterical, crazy, insane is to perpetuate something we’ve already seen on film so many times before."
"[On the slow growth of the number of female conductors] With women, historically, it's been, you know, "You should be happy for what you have. Don’t push people — they’ve done a lot already!" There’s always this sort of patronising approach."
"We could have been programming work by under-represented people for the last 50 years, but the choice was not to. We could have had women on the podium, but the choice was not to."
"[On a perceived orchestra's retreat to conservative stances after the pandemic] I thought classical music institutions would come back with a new approach, new ways of connecting with audiences. Have we seen that? In some ways I see these organisations trying to go back to the way they used to do it. I'm not saying that what we do — the actual music-making — needs to drastically change, but everything around it does. And it can’t just be, ‘Oh we’re going to include a piece by a woman composer, or a person of colour’. It becomes perfunctory rather than celebratory."
"But, fundamentally, I think goodness is very underrated."
"Ninety - nine percent right is still one percent wrong!"
"Rock and roll is written by illiterates and listened to by illiterates. Ironically, we see today a moronic individual with a guitar - and he is a failure unless his records sell a million copies. Jazz was born and bred in the honkytonks of New Orleans and will always be a part of American music - but rock and roll isn't and never will be. The worst part in current trends in music today is the effect it has on the youth of today. The kind of music a person hears is the kind he learns to appreciate. What is happening when these youths leave school? Where are the adult bands and orchestras? What is happening to the sense of values of a nation which has no place in its adult life for music? Russia has the greatest music education program of any nation on earth. [Both Italy and France] have eight conservatories of music. We have none. In Paris, you can hear any of three 100-piece orchestras 24 hours a day on radio, subsidized by the government."
"At present...I feel that my works require a modified serial technique, but it is a very unorthodox one, and almost never strictly adhered to throughout a given work. Neither does it destroy all tonal feeling...I do not mean tonality, but I do stress a progressive direction from one "note" center to another...(twelve-tone music) seems to be overly static without providing that experience of forward or backward movement that is an essential part of our musical art."
"I don’t understand any music! I feel it. I want them to feel something! I don’t want them to understand it. If I wanted them to understand exactly what I meant, I can write an essay! I’ve written a lot of speeches and essays and articles and everything else, but I don’t want that! I don’t want a particular thing; I want them to let themselves go and feel something they’ve never felt before. That’s all. That’s what a concert is — not a pleasurable experience; it is an experience of life-changing dimensions!"
"I have one idea about this whole interpretation problem as it relates to orchestral music — too many of our conductors start with old music. What they should do is interpret the music of our time and then go backwards. They would be much better off because if you interpret a contemporary work, where the composer is still alive and have contact with the compositional mind, you will also play older music as looked at from the perspective of the composer, instead of an interpretive kind of idea. I hate the performer that says, “Did you ever hear my Beethoven?” I don’t want to hear his Beethoven! I want to hear Beethoven."
"To me, the wonderful thing about music is a love affair between the performer and the composer, and between the composer and his audience. This love affair is a tripartite thing."
"Too much emphasis is placed upon the technical aspect of contemporary music and not enough on its communicative and aesthetic impact. This is where i strongly disagree with many of my colleagues. I firmly believe that a composer should have all contemporary techniques in his immediate grasp, and must be able to use these as they suit his purposes."