Top 99 Symphony Quotes

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

‘Bitter Sweet Symphony’ is one of the greatest pieces of modern art created by anyone. I’m not blowing my own trumpet here.

To me, a song is not finished. To me, there’s no such thing as a finished anything. All of Beethoven’s nine symphonies, to me, are one. I think of it as having no beginning and no end.

If some of our works are symphonies, then wrapped walkways was chamber music.

‘Iceman’ covers a bigger scope than ‘Long Day’s Journey.’ But they’re both fabulous pieces of work. ‘Iceman’ is like a symphony. It’s got all the movements, all these different voices. ‘Long Day’s Journey’ is more like a beautiful string quartet.

Whenever I heard the song of a bird and the answering call of its mate, I could visualize the notes in scale, all built up within my consciousness as a natural symphony.

Rock music has always embraced – and even represented – rebellion, rowdiness, and a robust disdain for social decorum. But along with more classical art forms like theater, opera, and the symphony, it’s suffering from the distracted, smartphone-carrying audiences of the digital age.

The ‘Mozart Symphony No. 27’ is an early composition. I find it charming.

In concertos, I stand up, and I conduct with the bow when I’m not playing. During symphonies, I sit, but sometimes I stop playing to conduct. Being seated in a section allows me to feel more like we’re playing chamber music, which is how I like to approach it.

On Mars, where the air is spare – a hundred times less dense than on Earth – someone could hear you scream. But you’d have to really strain to get anyone’s attention. On the Red Planet, where the wind is high-pitched and faint, even a symphony orchestra will sound as thin as cheap gruel.

I never want projects to be finished; I have always believed in unfinished work. I got that from Schubert, you know, the ‘Unfinished Symphony.’

A symphony is no joke.

The symphonies are the things that, as a soloist, I’ve not gotten to play. I used to travel the world playing concertos, and then I would sit and listen to the symphony.

Each piece I tell stands on its own, and then it all ties together. It segues from story to story, and then I wrap it up – like three-piece movements in a symphony.

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.

Essentially, all expressions of human nature ever produced, from a caveman’s paintings to Mozart’s symphonies and Einstein’s view of the universe, emerge from the same source: the relentless dynamic toil of large populations of interconnected neurons.

Subway Symphony is a little idea I had to change the sound of the subway turnstiles into different pieces of music, depending on what station you’re entering.

No, I don’t know how to get young people to start listening to jazz again. But I do know this: Any symphony orchestra that thinks it can appeal to under-30 listeners by suggesting that they ‘should’ like Schubert and Stravinsky has already lost the battle.

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

I’m like any other composer. If you give me five years to write a symphony, I’m still going to be asking for more time two days before it’s due.

But some people will say you just did these programs. Well, yes, the programs are important and I’m proud of the programs, but mostly I’m proud of the way the San Francisco Symphony plays these programs.

I’m very proud of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

It’s a physical challenge. It’s a spiritual challenge. I’m studying almost every day a different symphony, not returning to any one for a week.

You cannot own a symphony or a novel in the way you can own a Damien Hirst. As a result there are far fewer fake symphonies or fake novels than there are fake works of visual art.

Long track is more of a symphony… You’re out there and you want to get in the zone.

My experience with the Detroit Symphony has been musically very satisfying. They have a wonderful sound, which for me is one of the most important qualities in an orchestra.

To play with a symphony today is just fabulous.

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.

In a time when directors did not fear composers with a strong voice, Morricone wrote scores like operas or symphonies, with passion, scope, bravura and intelligence.

I grew up loving symphonies. Beethoven is beautiful.

Music is such an important part of society, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra offers such great quality, and we just want to share it.

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.

When I was very young, I remember my mother telling me about a friend of hers in Germany, a pianist who played a symphony that wasn’t permitted, and the Germans came up on stage and broke every finger on her hands. I grew up with stories of Nazis breaking the fingers of Jews.

I was always the kid on scholarship, I was a soloist with my company, I’d been working with the symphony since I was 14.

Cleveland has a very bad reputation, but there’s a lot of stuff that’s left over from when there were very wealthy people – the Art Museum and a world class symphony that’s still world class.

One of our books has been made into a musical, ‘The Great American Mousical,’ which I directed at the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut. And another, ‘Simeon’s Gift,’ has been adapted for a symphony orchestra and five performers. I’m also a very proud member of the board of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Focusing on that one review you feel is unfair misses the value, which is the whole symphony of opinions you get on your page.

When I think of music, I think of music in its totality, complete. From the lowest blues to the highest symphony, you know, so what I’d like to do is exemplify each style of as many periods as I can possibly do.

I don’t believe in a composer who is only able to compose, who can’t play or conduct, can only use a computer. If that trend continues there will be no more symphonies, no more oratorios.

This is what I want in heaven… words to become notes and conversations to be symphonies.

I never listen to music when I am writing. It would be impossible. I listen to Bach in the mornings, mostly choral music; also some Handel, mostly songs and arias; I like Schubert’s and Beethoven’s chamber music and Sibelius’ symphonies; for opera, I listen to Mozart and in recent years Wagner.

I remain extraordinarily proud of the Vaughan Williams symphonies I recorded with the LSO, and in the 1980s and ’90s, I made an almost complete cycle of orchestral works by Richard Strauss with the Vienna Philharmonic.

It’s different for people who have not seen a symphony conductor conduct from a chair. I feel very connected to the orchestra in a way that a conductor sometimes does not feel. I think it’s more visceral.

When I listen to symphonies, or long pieces of music, there are so many different moods and movements, and things that are really beautiful going to something with a lot of tension.

I started writing my own symphony. I wrote about a page and a half. My mum and dad took it into music class and gave it, pleased as punch, to the teacher, Miss Montgomery. She played it on the piano for them. So I think they’re the only ones that ever heard it.

Urban renewal always happens as a symphony of events, and part of the symphony is innovative, optimistic developers with the ability and willingness to transform historic properties.

It feels like my job is to support people. I support great artists. When I worked with a symphony, I sat in the third chair, not the first chair.

We’ve been performing with symphonies all of our career and it sounds so wonderful when they play ‘My Girl’ with the large string section, I want to turn around and look.

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.

Although, I am proud of all my Symphonies as they all have something special to say, my particular favourite is the Fifth. As the great Mahler expert Donald Mitchell said that if Mahler had written another Symphony, it would have been my Fifth!

It’s a wonderful thing to play with symphony orchestras – I’ve played with many – but it’s really special in Israel because you have so many great musicians.

My earliest memories are listening to my Grandmother playing the piano at our house as I jumped up and down on the couch. She was a violinist with the Pittsburgh Symphony in the 30s and 40s, and was a huge influence on me.

The code of life is like a Beethoven symphony. We have not yet learned how to write music like that. But evolution does it very well. I am learning how to use evolution to compose new music.

I approach everything as chamber music. Even with Beethoven symphonies, I lead from the violin and basically encourage the orchestra to think of it as a giant string quartet.

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

We did experiments with the Boston Symphony for many years where we measured the angles of incidence of sound arriving at the ears of the audience, then took the measurements back to MIT and analyzed them.

I’d be much more likely to watch the latest Tarantino movie than to listen to a Mahler symphony.

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?

What makes a Beethoven symphony spectacular, what makes a Brahms rhapsody spectacular is that the patterns are wondrous.

In string theory, all particles are vibrations on a tiny rubber band; physics is the harmonies on the string; chemistry is the melodies we play on vibrating strings; the universe is a symphony of strings, and the ‘Mind of God’ is cosmic music resonating in 11-dimensional hyperspace.

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

The music lovers of London and the country deserve to have something where orchestras can flourish. You have no idea how wonderful an orchestra like the London Symphony Orchestra can sound in a great concert hall.

If he’s a true symphony artist, he knows better than that because he knows that the only truly creative musician is the jazz musician.

Playing the Beethoven symphonies, for example, is a consummate experience for a musician because Beethoven speaks so directly to who we are as people.

People who go to concerts hear Beethoven’s symphonies hundreds of times, but ‘Star Trek’ is recorded, so it’s not played all the time.

I wanted to unite the popular and the serious, and to make a popular symphony, a popular oratorio.

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.

Beethoven’s fourth and seventh symphonies have a certain amount in common. Well, of course they’re both written by Beethoven, but besides that, I would say their overall effect and idea is to provide the listener with an incredible sense of joy.

When I was to come to Washington the first time as Music Director of the Boston Symphony, Mrs. Johnson phoned us to find out if they could give us a party and who we would like to meet.

My parents once caught me conducting Beethoven’s ‘Fifth Symphony.’

If I weren’t the way I am, I shouldn’t write my symphonies.

It’s Messiaen’s Turangalila Symphony I’m really looking forward to. Simon Rattle does it perfectly: he understands its primal rhythmic life force, and he and the wonderful Berliners make it a sheer riot of orchestral colour.

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.

For me to rehearse with a children’s orchestra a Mahler symphony was to really work. We had three or four weeks of rehearsal with the orchestra, every day eight or nine hours, putting the First together. I had been conducting Tchaikovsky a lot and Beethoven, but Mahler was different.

I first heard Mahler’s second symphony aged 11 in Liverpool, and it inspired me to become a conductor.

Everything will pass, and the world will perish but the Ninth Symphony will remain.

Birmingham did a truly remarkable thing in building Symphony Hall, which is the finest concert hall in the U.K. and one of the best in the world. The city has supported music without putting on the brakes.

As a composer and as a musician I’m a true believer – and this is not to be overly diplomatic – I’m a believer that there’s artistry in everything from a lawn gnome to a desk chair to a symphony to an Andy Warhol painting. There’s art in absolutely everything.

In music, they’re not endlessly rewriting Beethoven’s ‘Third Symphony;’ in visual art, they aren’t painting portraits of 16th-century royalty. Art moves forward.

I’d always loved strings. When I was in high school and saw strings playing on stage, an orchestra or a symphony, all those bows moving at the same time… wow.

My grade 3 teacher put on a kids’ Christmas concert, and I played the kazoo, so my mother bought me a trumpet. I took lessons for eight years, was in the Kitsilano Boys Band, and I played in the Vancouver Junior Symphony for two years.

I tend to write short, brief snippets – I lean toward the chamber music end as opposed to the symphony end of things.

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.

We can’t afford big symphonies but we commission works that sound rich and symphonic because of the nature of the instrumentation and the people we work with.

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

What we accepted as great art – whether the book, the script, the painting, the symphony – is that which could be saved and savored. But the performances of the athletic artists who ran and jumped and wrestled were gone with the wind.

‘Deconstruction’ is a really heavy record, a real symphony in a lot of ways, but with heavy musicians from the metal world – friends of mine.

To practice your scales, so to speak, in order play the symphony, is what you have to do as a young poet.

I sometimes feel it is to my disadvantage that I have not conducted the Cleveland Orchestra or the Boston or Chicago symphonies, but then I have had to sacrifice something in order to have enough time with my orchestras.

Cincinnatians support a symphony, an opera, a ballet, museums, many galleries and theater groups.

Calling ‘Instagram’ a photo-sharing app is like calling a newspaper a letter-sharing book, or a Mozart grand era symphony a series of notes. ‘Instagram’ is less about the medium and more about the network.

There are many wonderful orchestras in the world, but very few who have a character or personality of their own. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is one of them, and I think it very important to recognize and respect that character.

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.

When Sean and I are old, we’re just going to compose weird abstract symphonies.

Western classical music is participative. Look at the number of people who are involved in a symphony.

It’s clear on the one hand that an education enriches and informs a response to beauty, even makes it possible in esoteric cases. On the other hand, there’s no question that someone with no musical education whatsoever might wander into a concert hall and be overwhelmed by the ‘Beethoven Pastoral Symphony’.

Human atoms are the notes, their life the symphony.

I believe buildings are alive, and when you want to make a change, you have to change in the same symphony.

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