American Conductor Quotes

Leonard Bernstein

Yehudi Menuhin

Henry Mancini

John Williams

John Philip Sousa

Dimitri Tiomkin

Harry Connick, Jr.

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.

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.

I thought I heard Buddy Bolden say,
Funky butt, funky butt, take it away!

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

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

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...

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.

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

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

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

Any composer who is gloriously conscious that he is a composer must believe that he receives his inspiration from a source higher than himself.

John Philip Sousa

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

In all teaching there must be a fusion of authority as an adult providing a stable framework for the children in one's care, and humility as another human being ready to educate an equal who may turn out to be a superior.

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

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.

Oscar acceptance speech for best score in 1955:

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

Dimitri Tiomkin

With the new technology that keeps entering the media, film composers are constantly being placed in new learning situations. Acknowledging this and realizing that one must keep up, I maintain, nonetheless, that the real creative power is in the mind and heart of the composer.

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 is an American original - direct, honest, personal, idiosyncratic, and free of pretension. His music is directed to, and reflective of, the American soul.

I gave you my arms, my lips, my heart,
My love, my life, my all,
But the best that I had to offer you
I found was all too small.

New Orleans is a city of paradox. Sin, salvation, sex, sanctification, so intertwined yet so separate.

Harry Connick, Jr.

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!

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

Leonard Bernstein

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.