At nine or ten, I was playing guitar in music class in my elementary school in Jackson, Michigan. They had a guitar class, and I played with ten of my classmates, and we did a little guitar orchestra for a school music.
Remember, if you do the same act for 20, 30 years it gets a little boring unless you’ve got something else going for you… And the orchestra really kept you going. They’d laugh at all your jokes, even if they’d been hearing them for the last 30 years.
Playing in an orchestra is where I learned the most about music.
Before Liszt, a conductor was someone who just facilitated the performance, who would keep people together or beat the time, indicate the entries. After Liszt, that was no longer the case; a conductor was someone who shaped the music in an intense musical way, who played the orchestra as an instrument.
A man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back on the crowd.
There are two types of conductors. One is the good conductor who can do passionate music but also listen to the singers and do the orchestra. And then there are great conductors, who have their own opinion on the music, who are ruling everything – and not listening much to the singers, but the orchestra play amazingly.
I was in the chorus in high school, not a soloist. I was on the basketball team. I was in modern dance, part of the group. I was a cheerleader, part of the group. I played the violin, part of the orchestra. I never wanted to be out there alone. Ever.
My idea was to go to Vienna to study conducting and perhaps play in an orchestra first, so I thought before I got to Vienna I could do with a little training in Paris.
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.
I can’t stand going out to one more dinner with some Mrs. So-and-So who might leave a million dollars to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra when she dies.
I worked with Jack Nitzsche for ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,’ and we’d booked a symphony orchestra. He dismissed them and came with a little man who poured water into glasses of different sizes to make a glass harmonica. And most of the music for the film was that – with some Indian flutes and some drums.
Through conducting, you express through your arms, through your face and even the body, what you want to tell, so the musicians of the orchestra understand.
Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra – not choreography to the audience.
I admire Tom Ades: he’s a brilliant conductor, and he gets just the right hard, brilliant sound from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra for Russian music.
It’s been a thrilling journey – I have had to really learn that an orchestra is an entity – it’s a creature. I have been calling it the dragon and the conductor is the dragon tamer. And you just have to… ride and don’t let go and you will be fine.
I have ambitions to do a Broadway record one of these days and get in the studio with like, a real orchestra. I’m a big musical theatre geek.
My brother Leon started it all. He played the piano. In school they made me leader of the orchestra because I played the violin, but I followed Leon and the boys in his jazz band around.
When I composed, I heard my music played by the orchestra within days of completion of the score. No master at a conservatory, no matter how revered, can teach as much by verbal criticism as can a cold and analytical hearing of one’s own music being played.
So now, thirty years, forty years later, I mean, I could find a whole orchestra of a thousand to put these things together in New York City alone. In those days, if I could scrape up twenty musicians to do this it was something extraordinary.
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.
I’ve always loved mixing Middle Eastern instruments into a classical orchestra.
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 studied with Seymour Rosenfeld, who was first trumpeter of the Philadelphia Orchestra.
When I was younger, I used to do that a lot: I would hear a part of a song that would really relax me and then put it on repeat. That would send me to sleep. It was quite obvious classical music, people like Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Erik Satie, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel.
I want to work with the big orchestras. I want to have a big family.
My favorite song? ‘Amazing Grace.’ Anybody singing it. But the best it’ll ever be done is by the Scottish National Pipe band and their National Orchestra. It’ll bring tears to your eyes.
Performing the American Music Awards and having Harrison Ford introduce you behind the John Williams orchestra for Star Wars, and then Meghan Trainor is in the front just standing up and like, ‘I love you guys!’ That was a huge moment.
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.
Very often, if I know the orchestra doesn’t know a piece or it’s a new piece, I have main ideas about it. But then we start to play and I never talk about places where they played so beautiful and so clear in the beginning that there is nothing to say.
I feel I’m most successful when I’m playing a concert, and it doesn’t necessarily seem like I’m playing a saxophone but am coming off more like an orchestra or something like that.
In the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra we play such a diversity of music, with 10 arrangers in the band, we don’t really worry about whether it’s contemporary or not.
I think touring is an important part of the life of an orchestra. Not only sharing with other audiences, but bringing that sense of family that you get back home. The sense of growing deeper into the music, of making it all sound like chamber music – that comes from being together on tour.
From early on, when synthesizers were first introduced into music, I liked the idea that you could get a big sound with them, electronic, but like an orchestra. And I could play it all myself. That was exciting.
The game is if the orchestra can hear each other, they play better. If they play better and there’s a tangible feeling between the orchestra and the audience, if they feel each other, the audience responds and the orchestra feels it.
