20th-century Conductor Quotes

Leonard Bernstein

Yehudi Menuhin

Henry Mancini

John Williams

Daniel Barenboim

Lorin Maazel

Dimitri Tiomkin

If, as is nearly always the case, music appears to express something, this is only an illusion, and not a reality.

I wanted to combine American purity and beauty of sound and the virtuosity of execution with the European sense of tradition, warmth of expression, and sense of style.

Conducting is the sound of a musician who makes no sound.

To have real knowledge, one must understand the essence of things and not only their manifestations.

Daniel Barenboim

Opera is everything rolled into one—music, theater, the dance, color and voices and theatrical illusions.

Parsifal is the kind of opera that starts at six o'clock. After it has been going three hours, you look at your watch and it says 6.20.

If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.

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 artifical life support, thought, and continue to threaten the increasingly fragile classical ecosystem.

Richard Taruskin

I'm so sorry for you; your lives have been so easy. You can't play great music unless your heart's been broken.

Benjamin Zander

In truth, I became a conductor because deep down I wanted to conduct Brahmss four symphonies and Richard Strausss tone poems.

Oscar acceptance speech for best score in 1955:

I would like to thank Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, Strauss, Rimsky-Korsakov.

Dimitri Tiomkin

Schooling, by definition, must be conservative. It is naturally dependent on an older generation's level of knowledge and sense of values.

Compassion is the litmus test and culminating touchstone of a spirituality of Earth.

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...

In your life expect some trouble
When you worry you make it double.

From the time I could play the piano, I remember trying to write tunes. They were in my head, and I would just sit down and start noodling. Next thing I knew, I had written a melody.

Marvin Hamlisch

Music, as long as it exists, will always take its departure from the major triad and return to it. The musician cannot escape it any more than the painter his primary colors or the architect his three dimensions.

Creativity in all forms of life, from arts to business to domestic situations, depends on our ability to recognize and explore gaps

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.

There is something about music that keeps its distance even at the moment that it engulfs us. It is at the same time outside and away from us and inside and part of us. In one sense it dwarfs us, and in another we master it. We are led on and on, and yet in some strange way we never lose control.

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.

Mozart's music is constantly escaping from its frame, because it cannot be contained in it.

Leonard Bernstein

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!

One can create a masterpiece by using any means of expression, no matter how absurd, just as one can make a beautiful gesture lying at the edge, or even the bottom, of a precipice.

Witold Lutosławski