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.
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