Quotes About Conductors

#1. You know why conductors live so long? Because we perspire so much.

John Barbirolli

#2. Conductors are performers.

Michael Tilson Thomas

#3. A good example of how it must have been is today's world of conducting, which is still utterly dominated by men, and the prejudice the few female conductors have to battle even today is astounding.

Lara St. John

#4. The merit of poetry, in its wildest forms, still consists in its truth-truth conveyed to the understanding, not directly by the words, but circuitously by means of imaginative associations, which serve as its conductors.

Thomas B. Macaulay

#5. Conductors do not know how the oboe does its work, but they know what the oboe should contribute.

Peter Drucker

#6. I played with the best
conductors of the world.

Mstislav Rostropovich

#7. Directors have a tendency to use their hands like orchestra conductors. They don't realize that the actor is looking at their faces, anyway.

Alan J. Pakula

#8. Catalysts are the conductors who choreograph the chemical dance that results in the formation of new structures.

Robert H. Grubbs

#9. Perhaps, once I am gone, the one thing I might be remembered for is having sung a great deal of Mahler with a great many phenomenal conductors. It is wonderful music, very spiritual.

Maureen Forrester

#10. Go to the young conductors who are not making it, and you will hear how we shouldn't push ourselves or sell ourselves, how they don't have the right connections and the right opportunities. Well, you can be sure they've had the opportunities.

Zubin Mehta

#11. I deny that either singers or conductors can create or work creatively - this, as I have always said, is a conception that leads to the abyss.

Giuseppe Verdi

#12. The eloquence of one stimulates all the rest, some up to the speaking-point, and all others to a degree that makes them good receivers and conductors, and they avenge themselves for their enforced silence by increased loquacity on their return.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#13. The composers could no longer direct all performances in person, and so the responsibility of interpreting their works in the spirit in which they had been conceived was placed upon conductors.

Anton Seidl

#14. Many, many years ago, I was one of the few conductors who talked to the audience and now a lot of classical conductors have figured it out ... otherwise, you just get the back of someone's head playing music you could hear on a CD. It's not enough anymore.

Marvin Hamlisch

#15. The very first time I was on a car in Atlanta, I saw the conductor - all conductors are white - ask a Negro woman to get up and take a seat farther back in order to make a place for a white man. I have also seen white men requested to leave the Negro section of the car.

Ray Stannard Baker

#16. The great leaders are like the best conductors - they reach beyond the notes to reach the magic in the players.

Blaine Lee

#17. Of course, all people have their own reasons for believing what they do about gender. In my case, in over two decades of collaborating with men and women in music - conductors or otherwise - I have seen no distinction.

Michael Hersch

#18. When I am with composers, I say I am a conductor. When I am with conductors, I say I am a composer.

Leonard Bernstein

#19. Drummers are conductors - we set the pace for the music - so if you're not relaxed and feeling right, the whole thing goes out the window.

Steven Adler

#20. I have a big problem with conductors who gesture a lot.

James Levine

#21. The great actors are the luminous ones. They are the great conductors of the stage.

Ethel Barrymore

#22. Hover boards, unfortunately, currently violate the laws of physics. Supermagnets exist, but they have to be cooled to near absolute zero, and they are extremely expensive. So Michael J. Fox's hover boards are not possible until we invent room temperature super conductors.

Michio Kaku

#23. Below birds crossing the lake of the sky
and purple martins on power lines, down
to the trees and one thing my brother said
that stays with me from Long Island to Vermont,
something about trees being conductors
of spirit ...

Anne Marie Macari

#24. Conductors' careers are made for the most part with 'Romantic' music. 'Classic' music eliminates the conductor; we do not remember him in it.

Igor Stravinsky

#25. When I was young, Tchaikovsky was ruined for me by conductors who made it slick and treacly. Hearing Valery Gergiev conduct Tchaikovsky has been a revelation - he brings out all its raw passion. And Gergiev with the super-virtuoso LSO - well, it's just the perfect combination.

Charles Hazlewood

#26. I think conductors do spend too little time with their orchestras.

Zubin Mehta

#27. Good conductors know when to let an orchestra lead itself. Ninety percent of what a conductor does comes in the rehearsal - the vision, the structure, the architecture.

Joshua Bell

#28. Every purely natural object is a conductor of divinity, and we have but to expose ourselves in a clean condition to any of these conductors, to be fed and nourished by them. Only in this way can we procure our daily spirit bread.

John Muir

#29. Few of us boggle - though we should - at the fact that Louis Armstrong sang and played trumpet with similar panache, or that Leonard Bernstein and Benjamin Britten were equally adept as composers, conductors and pianists.

Terry Teachout

#30. They gave me four weeks, and I asked if the first week could be just music with the two main conductors. So, the conductors came over to my home, and we worked in the music room, and I learned my two little songs.

Rue McClanahan

#31. I look at composers and conductors, anybody involved in music or writing or art in general; they got more done as they got older. If I can, I'll be one of those people because what I do is my passion.

Sarah Brightman

#32. I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can't say; I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.

Harriet Tubman

#33. The intensity of being in front of all these incredible musicians and tremendous conductors in these elaborate halls can be overwhelming.

Idina Menzel

#34. You hear the same work by different orchestras, different conductors, violinists, pianists, singers, and slowly, the work reveals itself and begins to live deeper in you.

David Ogden Stiers

#35. Conducting, I tried it once off the cuff, and quickly realized there were subtle aspects that I was missing. There is a lot more to it that I was able to grasp simply by watching conductors.

Carter Burwell

#36. Conductors don't suffer, they are part of the performance.

Michael Tippett

#37. Books are the best conductors of knowledge, they transfer knowledge efficiently from one human to another with 0% knowledge loss inbetween.

Chandan Sharma

#38. Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors.

Leonard Bernstein

#39. The great secret is that an orchestra can actually play without a conductor at all. Of course, a great conductor will have a concept and will help them play together and unify them. But there are conductors that actually inhibit the players from playing with each other properly.

Joshua Bell

#40. Today we can establish Sharia law because our nation will acquire well-being only with Islam and Sharia. The Muslim Brothers and the Freedom and Justice Party will be the conductors of these goals,

Mohammed Morsi

#41. I was starting a group of musicians and we had a group of young composers in Finland back in the '70s, and the real conductors, the professional conductors at the time were not interested in our stuff.

Esa-Pekka Salonen

#42. My whole life, I've been watching conductors. I was 7 the first time I played with a conductor. Seeing the ones that do it well, it's an amazing thing.

Joshua Bell

#43. I've always been accused of moving around too much when I play concertos. Sometimes, conductors ask me which of us is leading.

Joshua Bell

#44. Journalists were never intended to be the cheerleaders of a society, the conductors of applause, the sycophants. Tragically, that is their assigned role in authoritarian societies, but not here - not yet.

Chet Huntley

#45. Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra - not choreography to the audience.

George Szell

#46. So many times, I've seen conductors that, every time they have a thought, they stop the orchestra and say it, and I can see the orchestra rolling their eyes and saying, 'Oh, God, he stopped again.' So there's a technique to rehearsing.

Joshua Bell

#47. Good conductors know when to push and when to lay back. I've known so many great conductors that I'm still doing what I can to learn the craft of this role.

Joshua Bell

#48. I was different from most young conductors today.

Kurt Masur

#49. Leaders today should be more conductors than solo artists.

Brad Lomenick

#50. Carbon nanotubes are amazing because they're really good electrical conductors, yet they are only a few atoms in diameter. You can make transistors out of them in the same way you can with silicon. At Berkeley, we made the narrowest device anybody had ever made. It was basically a single molecule.

Paul McEuen

#51. Composers are not all good conductors.

Anton Seidl

#52. Young conductors who are confident enough, they very often have success.

Kurt Masur

#53. On the other hand, when I give it closer thought, I realize I'm not enough of a dictator to conduct an orchestra because it requires a pretty awful person. When you read these biographies of famous conductors, they are all awful people who fail in their private relationships.

Eberhard Weber

#54. This year - a factory of semiconductors. Next year - a factory of whole conductors!

Todor Zhivkov

#55. The (photographic) negative is the equivalent of the composers score and the print is the equivalent of the conductors performance.

Ansel Adams