Conductor Quotes

To love as Christ loves is to let our love be a practical and not a sentimental thing.

Charles Villiers Stanford

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

A musicologist is a man who can read music but can't hear it.

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

Leonard Bernstein

Revolutions are celebrated when they are no longer dangerous.

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

The most perfect technique is that which is not noticed at all.

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

Harry Connick, Jr.

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.

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

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.

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.

A New York City taxi driver asked him where to go; Karajan replied "No matter - I am in demand everywhere."

Herbert von Karajan

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

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

Daniel Barenboim

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

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.

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!

I feel like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien. I cannot cast out the old way of writing and I cannot acquire the new. I have made an intense effort to feel the musical manner of today, but it will not come to me.

Sergei Rachmaninoff

Nothing is more difficult than talking about music: if it is a prickly business for musicians, it is almost impossible for anyone else—the strongest, subtlest minds go astray.

Camille Saint-Saëns

I feel that the end of my days is drawing near; my senses are failing me; my delight and strength in creating songs are gone; he, who was once honored by half of Europe, is forgotten; others have come and are the objects of admiration; one must give place to another. Nothing remains for me but trust in God, and the hope of an unclouded existence in the Land of Peace.

Antonio Salieri

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...

The highest reaches of music come thrillingly close to the central core and essence of life itself.

Leopold Stokowski

Conformism is so hot on the heels of the mass-produced avant-garde that the 'ins' and the 'outs' change places with the speed of mach 3.

Igor Stravinsky

You put your right arm in,
Your right arm out
In, out, in, out and shake it all about.
You do the hokey cokey and you turn around,
And that's what it's all about.