Quotes About Orchestra Music

#1. Whenever I get asked to write orchestra music or music that is for a lot of players, I try to make it a little sad.

Nico Muhly

#2. Writing orchestra music, you need for the emotional content to come from everyone doing everything together, adding up as it goes, a crowd mentality.

Nico Muhly

#3. I never thought that I would write orchestra music, but in fact I did write a group of orchestra pieces.

Paul Lansky

#4. There are so many parts of music that it's actually a pleasure for me to work with an orchestra, or a jazz band, or a choir, and use every element that the musical tool box can offer. The world of music I love so much, and I can change the costume depending on the part, and I'm actually in the film.

Alexandre Desplat

#5. You probably think of the orchestra as a heterogeneous mass of instruments
producing a confused agreeable mass
of sound. You do not listen for details because you have never trained your ears to listen to details.

Arnold Bennett

#6. Yes, but I view Frank's music as fully composed. In other words, the arrangements can work for any idiom such as a rock band or an orchestra. Frank was a brilliant arranger and could make his music work in any context. He proved that tour after tour and album after album.

Dweezil Zappa

#7. Farsi Couplet:
Naala-e zanjeer-e Majnun arghanoon-e aashiqanast
Zauq-e aan andaza-e gosh-e ulul-albaab neest


English Translation:
The creaking of the chain of Majnun is the orchestra of the lovers,
To appreciate its music is quite beyond the ears of the wise.

Amir Khusrau

#8. The best part of the high school in Hastings must have been the Music Department. Its orchestra and concert band did well in county competitions, and the dance band formed by its students was the best in the region. I played lead trumpet in all of them.

Edmund Phelps

#9. I had a big background in listening to classical music and I started trying to compose, like I was playing the guitar but I heard an orchestra in my head.

John Fahey

#10. The symphony orchestra had played poorly, so the conductor was in a bad mood. That night he beat his wife
because the music hadn't been beautiful enough.

George Carlin

#11. 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.

Joshua Bell

#12. Music is composed on computers and other electronic equipment; producers don't want to spend money on orchestra.

Sivamani

#13. In the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra we play such a diversity of music, with 10 arrangers in the band, we don't really worry about whether it's contemporary or not.

Wynton Marsalis

#14. It is when music is added that a film can come to life for a director. A live orchestra, playing the score as a conductor watches the film on a huge screen, often gives a fimmaker the first real glimpse of his soon-to-be-completed work. That's where the magic is.

Robert Paul Wolff

#15. We are musical notes emanating from the quantum string section of a grand symphonic orchestra.

Kane Freeman

#16. When it comes to orchestral music, whenever I see a concert with orchestra and strings, and I arrive and there are speakers up, my heart always sinks a little bit, and I think, 'It's going to be down to some sound guy's ideas.' Contact microphones on the violins. I'm a purist, I suppose.

Jonny Greenwood

#17. Essentially, the [New York] Philharmonic is just like any other orchestra-they all have the spirit of kids, and if you scratch away a little of the fatigue and cynicism, out comes a 17-year-old music student again, full of wonder, exuberance and a tremendous love of music.

Zubin Mehta

#18. In symphonic music, when you are conducting, you do the same thing. You are feeling the whole orchestra, thinking ahead so you can prepare for a change.

David Amram

#19. I conceived of an instrument that would create sound without using any mechanical energy, like the conductor of an orchestra. The orchestra plays mechanically, using mechanical energy; the conductor just moves his hands, and his movements have an effect on the music artistry.

Leon Theremin

#20. I sang 'O Holy Night' with the Vatican orchestra, but also a Blake - a lullaby that William Blake wrote for the Christ child, and I set it to music, and the Vatican orchestra played the music.

Patti Smith

#21. Today all sounds belong to a continuous field of possibilities lying within the comprehensive dominion of music. Behold the new orchestra: the sonic universe! And the musicians: anyone and anything that sounds!

R. Murray Schafer

#22. The alarm in the morning? Well, I have an old tape of Carlo Maria Giulini conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in a perfectly transcendent version in Shubert's seventh symphony. And I've rigged it up so that at exactly 7:30 every morning it falls from the ceiling onto my face.

Stephen Fry

#23. Shared leadership ... is less like a an orchestra, where the conductor is always in charge, and more like a jazz band, where leadership is passed around ... depending on what the music demands at the moment and who feels most moved by the spirit to express the music.

Phillip C. Schlechty

#24. People clutch onto each other, but the orchestra plays on, because when everything else in life fails, there still has to be music

Anonymous

#25. Jazz is not a game of chance. Its sonorous disorder is only an appearance. It is an organized force obeying obscure laws, conforming to a secret technique, codified or not, and we discover that no one can become a virtuoso on the spur of the moment in this orchestra of 'noisemakers.

Wanda Landowska

#26. There is much modern music that is better adapted to a wind combination than to a string, although for obvious reasons originally scored for an orchestra. If in such cases the interpretation is equal to the composition the balance of a wind combination is more satisfying.

John Philip Sousa

#27. To his orchestra Stop da music, stop da music! You're supposed to follow da music, not chase it all over da place.

Jimmy Durante

#28. When I was growing up, in L.A., I went to these schools, Fairfax High School, Bancroft Junior High School, and they had great music departments. I always played in the orchestra, the jazz band, the marching band.

Flea

#29. A musical audience is at best uninspiring, at worst definitely drab ... Respectability hangs like a pall over the orchestra and the boxes; a sort of sterile sobriety ill-fitted to the passionate geometry of music.

Marya Mannes

#30. 'American Music' is an inventive, passionate, pithy novel whose major theme is love itself and whose minor theme, music, is an emotional, meaningful counterpoint. Like Count Basie and His Orchestra, this book swings.

Kate Christensen

#31. From early on, when synthesizers were first introduced into music, I liked the idea that you could get a big sound with them, electronic, but like an orchestra. And I could play it all myself. That was exciting.

John Carpenter

#32. Labs, too, can become machines. In science, it is more often a pejorative description than a complimentary one: an efficient, thrumming, technically accomplished laboratory is like a robot orchestra that produces perfectly pitched tunes but no music.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

#33. The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body. Always an orchestra, and just as music traverses walls, so sensuality traverses the body and reaches up to ecstasy.

Anais Nin

#34. Music is the most important thing. I'm thinking of my future. There has to be something new, and I want to be part of it. I want to lead an orchestra with excellent musicians. I want to play music which draws pictures of the world and its space

Jimi Hendrix

#35. If a professional musician in a symphony orchestra is playing Beethoven. But this particular orchestra have played this particular chestnut so many times, they can play it in their sleep. Does the genius remain present in the music or not?

Robert Fripp

#36. I just initiated the project where I write music for somebody else to write the lyrics and also for the orchestra to perform. I've just initiated the project. That leads the project into creating an independent label outside of game music.

Nobuo Uematsu

#37. The conductor is a peculiar person. He turns his back on his friends in the audience, shakes a stick at his players in the orchestra, and then wonders why nobody loves him.

Victor Borge

#38. I wanted the music to be full, to surround us, to lift us like the swell, so I rented a bloody orchestra. You only live once.

Mark Helprin

#39. No symphony orchestra ever played music like a two-year-old girl laughing with a puppy.

Bernard Williams

#40. I always admired very much the virtuosity in Strauss because, really, he's a master of using the orchestra. And I like virtuosity, I must say, even if the taste of the music is not always mine.

Pierre Boulez

#41. I tried to bring in the live orchestra like Bjork does. I love the feeling that that music gives me when I just listen to it. I mean it would be awesome to do an entire record like that. But unfortunately that's not my style. So rather than do a record like that I just got inspired by it.

Willa Ford

#42. I've always been fascinated by music and sounds. I was lucky to receive proper classical training as an orchestra player and I'm always learning as a composer, looking to create new flavors and colors.

Lior Ron

#43. If you can't play all the instruments in the orchestra of story, no matter what music may be in your imagination, you're condemned to hum the same old tune.

Robert McKee

#44. Music is about communication, and the chemistry between an audience and the orchestra is absolutely essential; the performance does not exist in a bubble.

Charles Hazlewood

#45. The music for 'The Departed' could have been played by an orchestra, but you make a decision about orchestration based on the context of the film. You want the music to broaden the scope of a film, not just repeat what you're seeing.

Howard Shore

#46. The orchestra confides in me about their music director or their conductor, and I've never seen a conductor that's been liked by everyone.

Joshua Bell

#47. If the rhythm or beat of the music changes with a live orchestra, you have to think on your feet. If you feel like you are not on your leg, you have to make a decision to make it look as though nothing is going wrong.

Misty Copeland

#48. I know this music from memory, not from the music.

Eugene Ormandy

#49. So, immediately after that, I got a commission to write a piece for chamber orchestra, and in working on the material I discovered it was possible to incorporate the Buddhist teachings into the music, so that's what I started to do.

Joseph Jarman

#50. Deep inside I feel that this world we live in is really a big, huge, monumental symphonic orchestra. I believe that in its primordial form, all of creation is sound and that it's not just random sound, that it's music.

Michael Jackson

#51. I think it's a very important collaboration between the conductor and the orchestra - especially when the conductor is one more member of the orchestra in the way that you are leading, but also respecting, feeling and building the same way for all the players to understand the music.

Gustavo Dudamel

#52. Danzon is my favorite Cuban music, played by a traditional string orchestra with flute and piano. It's very formally structured but romantic music, which derives from the French-Haitian contradance.

Rachel Kushner

#53. Although we are being presented in Carnegie Hall, we have to furnish a budget for our guest stars, and for the music writing - which is a huge budget in any orchestra that plays popular music.

Skitch Henderson

#54. I love working with an orchestra, but there are many ways to make music.

Howard Shore

#55. I never shied away from a challenge and I love doing big, epic films. They're interesting to me just on a pure music level, just in terms of the amount of music I could create for a symphony orchestra and chorus.

Howard Shore

#56. I admire Tom Ades: he's a brilliant conductor, and he gets just the right hard, brilliant sound from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra for Russian music.

Charles Hazlewood

#57. Then the bow orchestra began to play an apocalyptically beautiful canon, one of those pieces in which, surely, the composer simply transcribed what was given, and trembled in awe of the hand that was guiding him.

Mark Helprin

#58. I used to go with him and I'd sometimes play, take over from him. That was my first taste of the music business, I suppose, but I was also in the youth orchestra at Johnston Grammar.

Trevor Horn

#59. The trouble with women in an orchestra is that if they're attractive it will upset my players and if they're not it will upset me.

Thomas Beecham

#60. Music Doesn't Need Interpreters and Translators

Ellen J. Barrier

#61. I'm a geek and I'm a nerd, and I can listen into any piece of music. I think, I can usually tell you what orchestra it was, I can usually tell you what hall it was in. I can tell you, obviously who the conductor was, and who the composer was.

Hans Zimmer

#62. Music is the Universal Language that allows all people to communicate with each other.

Ellen J. Barrier

#63. Last year in Germany at a town hall in Leipzig there was a game music concert played by the orchestra and some of the Final Fantasy scores were played. This year there is another concert scheduled in the same location, for game music.

Nobuo Uematsu

#64. The waters of the stream played the part of the orchestra, and the sunlight provided the dancers. Every now and then a crescendo of wind highlighted the symphony in the clearing by the creek.

Edward Mooney Jr.

#65. I suppose, counting back, if the Beatles had been influenced by music in the same length of time ago - you'd have to put that into better English for me, thank you - they would have been like a banjo orchestra. They would have been doing show tunes.

Jonny Greenwood

#66. And what unity is to be had, at a time when orchestras are dying out, and when opera houses are about to close their doors; what's going to come next - when nothing new in music, for the orchestra, is truly lasting: pieces are performed once, and then they're thrown away.

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

#67. When I was younger, I used to do that a lot: I would hear a part of a song that would really relax me and then put it on repeat. That would send me to sleep. It was quite obvious classical music, people like Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Erik Satie, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel.

King Krule

#68. I come to New Orleans so often that, one day soon, someone's going to declare me a native. I love the food. I love the music. I serve on the board of the New Orleans Jazz Orchestra.

Soledad O'Brien

#69. Gioacchino Rossini, the composer of William Tell and many other operas, had a good grasp of the relationship between music and food: "What love is to the heart, appetite is to the stomach. The stomach is the conductor that leads and livens up the great orchestra of our emotions." If

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

#70. About 13-14 years ago, I went back to my alma mater, Fairfax High School, and ran into the music teacher. She invited me to come speak to the kids about the viability of a music career. When I went into the room where I used to play every day in a big orchestra, they had nothing!

Flea

#71. The smoke detectors began to ring; for they were battery-powered and thus still functioned, just as a record can still be played after the death of every member of the orchestra.

William T. Vollmann

#72. Let me say that I've never thought to conduct because the conductor has to think to the music before the orchestra. And the orchestra comes later. For me, it's terrible.

Andrea Bocelli

#73. When I composed, I heard my music played by the orchestra within days of completion of the score. No master at a conservatory, no matter how revered, can teach as much by verbal criticism as can a cold and analytical hearing of one's own music being played.

Andre Previn

#74. So when you enjoy the beats, the rock music - maybe even toned down with an orchestra - you are enjoying the spirit of the black race. And that's what I emphasize to the students.

Warren Jeffs

#75. If you think about how long it takes to write a piece of music for an orchestra, it's outrageous to me, outrageous.

Gail Zappa

#76. One time I introduced my orchestra as the Shampoo Music Makers instead of the Champagne Music Makers.

Lawrence Welk

#77. Right now I just finished writing the music for a Rugrats feature film and the third week of September I go to London, and the Orchestra is going to perform the score.

Mark Mothersbaugh