Top 100 Quotes About Orchestra
#1. I always imagined that to bring an orchestra to play together is not enough for a conductor.
Kurt Masur
#2. It really was truth or consequences, and Billy went with truth. It was just incredible." Forsaking public prominence, Strayhorn found personal freedom in service to the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Now there might not be a Billy Strayhorn Orchestra. But there was a Billy Strayhorn.
David Hajdu
#3. 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
#4. To lead an orchestra, you must turn your back on the crowd
Aristotle.
#5. No symphony orchestra ever played music like a two-year-old girl laughing with a puppy.
Bernard Williams
#6. I first played the Royal Albert Hall when I was 14. I was a violinist with the Birmingham Schools Concert Orchestra, and we travelled down from the Midlands for the last night of the School Proms. We played some pieces from the Harry Potter films, and the violin parts were really hard.
Laura Mvula
#7. An orchestra full of stars can be a disaster.
Kurt Masur
#8. The piano is really the featured instrument of a 10-piece chamber orchestra. The construction is the harmonic language.
Howard Shore
#9. 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
#10. A man who wants to lead the orchestra must turn his back on the crowd.
Max Lucado
#11. I don't mind conducting the orchestra if I can play the violin.
Edwin Land
#12. The conductor of an orchestra doesn't make a sound. He depends, for his power, on his ability to make other people powerful.
Benjamin Zander
#13. In vain we roared;in vain we tried
To rouse her into laughter:
Her pensive glances wandered wide
From orchestra to rafter -
"TIER UPON TIER!" she said,and sighed;
And silence followed after.
Lewis Carroll
#14. 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.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
#15. 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
#16. Mendelssohn I consider the first musician of the day; I doff my hat to him as my superior. He plays with everything, especially with the grouping of the instruments in the orchestra, but with such ease, delicacy and art, with such mastery throughout.
Robert Schumann
#17. The big turning point came when I played in the pit orchestra for a production of SWEENEY TODD and I spent most of the time watching the play instead of playing the score! And that's when I knew I had it bad for acting.
John Cariani
#18. The director is a bit analogous to the conductor of a symphony orchestra. It's a collaborative adventure.
Nicholas Meyer
#19. When I was four, we had to choose a musical instrument to play at school, and I chose the cello. I played until I was 18, and although I found it nerve-racking to play solo, I loved playing in an orchestra. When I left school I didn't carry on with it, which I regret.
Emilia Fox
#20. It was so much fun conducting an orchestra and watching the musicians' faces as some of Kanye's lyrics went by. They couldn't believe what was going on.
Jon Brion
#21. 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
#22. Every time I open the paper, there's some symphony orchestra collapsing somewhere in the United States. What the hell is going on? And then you find out that the board members try to run these things as businesses.
Brice Marden
#23. 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
#24. The actor is concerned with his own bit of it, but the director's somehow trying to work the whole thing into a much bigger picture. It's like conducting an orchestra.
Roland Joffe
#25. If a symbolic language dies, it tortures us like a nightmare, like a thousand piece orchestra grating on our nerves and tearing our mind to pieces ... It is a corpse with no symbolic power or strength.
Asger Jorn
#26. No one can whistle a symphony. It takes a whole orchestra to play it.
Halford Luccock
#27. A conductor can't be too arrogant with an orchestra and try to impose himself too much.
Anthony Hopkins
#29. I would love to do much more singing; it's just one of those things where I can't quite describe what it feels like when you're standing in front of a forty piece orchestra, and there's nothing between you and an audience but a microphone. It's like strapping yourself to a locomotive, and I love it.
Kevin Spacey
#30. 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
#31. It's just that, when the orchestra look at me, I want them to see a completely involved person who reflects what we rehearsed, and whose function is to make it possible for them to do it.
James Levine
#32. A woman's life in the orchestra is not as long as a man's; she is just not as good at 60 as a man is at 60.
Zubin Mehta
#33. Verdi was a genius. Sometimes in his operas, the strings in the orchestra, particularly the cellos, play in such a way that it is as if you are hearing the very heartbeat of Verdi.
Vincent B. "Chip" LoCoco
#34. All the stories and poems and letters and oracles and wisdom verses of God's Word, like individual instruments in a great orchestra, serve THE WHOLE story.
James MacDonald
#35. 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
#36. With an orchestra you are building citizens, better citizens for the community.
Gustavo Dudamel
#37. In order to lead the orchestra, you must first turn your back to the crowd.
Mike Mentzer
#38. 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
#39. Rod's a great singer. He's got a great voice, but there's no point to put a 30-piece orchestra behind him. I'm not going to knock anybody's right to make a living but you can always tell if somebody's heart and soul is into something, and I didn't think Rod was into it in that way.
Bob Dylan
#40. I change the language with which I use my voice. In opera, I know I have an orchestra behind me; I have to communicate to people very far from me.
Andrea Bocelli
#41. Not everybody gets to record with an orchestra, and not everybody that gets to record with an orchestra gets to write all their own stuff.
Harry Connick Jr.
#42. The Woodshed Orchestra trade in exuberance and might, a glistening thunderslap on the hind of musical atrophy. These songs leap from disc to lap, a many-legged beast trundling with joy and vision.
Dave Bidini
#43. Poetry as Symphony [10w]
Mind is orchestra,
words are instruments,
the poem,
a symphony.
Beryl Dov
#44. I would never inflict my bassoon on anybody really other than the long suffering audiences that come to the concerts of The Really Terrible Orchestra; which actually is really terrible.
Alexander McCall Smith
#45. I had a musician friend once tell me that it's not in the orchestra that you get the true test of the musicians but in the little trios and quintets where you really get to see if they've got the stuff. And the composer.
Wes Craven
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. Heaven answers with us the same purpose that the tuning-fork does with musicians. Our affections, the whole orchestra of them, are apt to get below the concert-pitch; and we take heaven to tune our hearts by.
Henry Ward Beecher
#49. I can't survive,' he once told me of his refusal to come indoors,'if I can't hear the orchestra the way I like to hear it.
Steve Lopez
#50. A dean is the conductor of an orchestra made up entirely of composers.
Mark William Roche
#51. 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
#52. We've all got voices inside our heads and over time they blend into a mental orchestra that all sounds the same. This is where we assume every voice we hear is our own even though that is not true.
Toni Sorenson
#53. 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
#54. No, I don't know how to get young people to start listening to jazz again. But I do know this: Any symphony orchestra that thinks it can appeal to under-30 listeners by suggesting that they 'should' like Schubert and Stravinsky has already lost the battle.
Terry Teachout
#55. 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
#56. I've watched the demise of the Hollywood orchestra, the house orchestras of the big studios.
Skitch Henderson
#57. 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
#58. Sometimes a little song is sweet to hear, even if the orchestra is more accomplished
Esme Raji Codell
#59. I thought Michael Mortilla was an orchestra unto himself!
Kevin Brownlow
#60. In the great orchestra we call life, you have an instrument and a song, and you owe it to God to play them both sublimely.
Max Lucado
#61. 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
#62. In or orchestra we have many nationalities, types, and temperaments.
Artur Rodzinski
#63. Remember, if you do the same act for 20, 30 years it gets a little boring unless you've got something else going for you ... And the orchestra really kept you going. They'd laugh at all your jokes, even if they'd been hearing them for the last 30 years.
Donald O'Connor
#64. Because I don't take money, I'll go anywhere and do a benefit concert with almost any orchestra.
David Ogden Stiers
#65. 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
#66. That smell mixed with the scent of getting tied up and fucked became the smell of complete release, of an orchestra connected by the simple movements of a skilled conductor.
C.D. Reiss
#67. I do like alternative rock and rap, but as far as inspirational, then I go full-on orchestra. It fills up your entire being.
Osric Chau
#68. 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
#69. As long as I can sing halfway decent, I'd rather sing than act. There's nothing like being in good voice, feeling good, having good numbers to do and having a fine orchestra.
Howard Keel
#70. And over the last ten years, after my work with the Brodsky Quartet, I had the opportunity to write arrangements for chamber group, chamber orchestra, jazz orchestra, symphony orchestra even.
Elvis Costello
#71. 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
#72. Out of the rhythm and sound of the sea that beat through the orchestra, something moved
pressing toward death with quiet insistent joy
the thread through the maze
the soul behind the toil and the crime and longing.
Jeanette Lee
#73. Working in Hollywood for the orchestra world is a very time consuming and laborious job.
John Williams
#74. But it is an orchestra," I say. "It's an imitation orchestra - an orchestrion, an orchestrina - whatever you call it, it does a terrible job! All you've done is turn a sublime group achievement, a human act, into an inferior egotistical solo -
Kim Stanley Robinson
#75. If an ensemble - I don't care if it's a duet or a forty-piece orchestra - the musicians, the two of them or the forty of them, are all trying to play as tight as possible, as one person. They're trying to play like they are one person.
John Densmore
#76. I wanted a line in a poem to be the hollow ney of the dervish orchestra whose plaintive wail is a call to God. But all I achieved was awkward shrieking. Not even the pure shriek of a reed in the rain.
Anne Michaels
#77. I just remember standing there, singing with the headphones on and the strings playing, just how wonderful that felt. But we so rarely got to go out and do it. Obviously, we don't carry a 70-80-piece orchestra with us when we do shows.
Ricky Skaggs
#78. Orchestra had a little brass ensemble on two tracks as well, but the rest was me. I knew I couldn't continue in this direction, even if people liked it, because I can only duplicate myself.
Eberhard Weber
#79. I sometimes feel it is to my disadvantage that I have not conducted the Cleveland Orchestra or the Boston or Chicago symphonies, but then I have had to sacrifice something in order to have enough time with my orchestras.
Zubin Mehta
#80. Every orchestra is different. Sometimes, you're blown away by a particular musician. If I'm playing the Brahms concerto, it's crucial to have a great oboe player, because we work in tandem.
Joshua Bell
#81. The Maximilian of her memory ceased to exist next to the real man. The former was a simple penny-lute tune. In the flesh, Max was the King's Theater orchestra playing Haydn.
Wendy LaCapra
#82. Music is composed on computers and other electronic equipment; producers don't want to spend money on orchestra.
Sivamani
#83. I used to play works in progress to people, but now I wait 'til it's finished, because you make excuses all the time: 'Well, there's gonna be an orchestra on it.' Rather than make excuses, wait 'til it's finished, and then they can say they don't like it.
Chris Lowe
#84. The cold is getting quite severe already; all the quail have gone, and last night there was a full orchestra of wolves outside the post-station.
Clive Phillipps-Wolley
#85. Whenever I listen to a children's orchestra, I learn. They feel everything, they enjoy everything, they have amazing energy.
Gustavo Dudamel
#86. Marital sex is a divine sympony between two people , and God is leading the orchestra .
Osunsakin Adewale
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. The Lord did not people the earth with a vibrant orchestra of personalities only to value the piccolos of the world. Every instrument is precious and adds to the complex beauty of the symphony.
Joseph B. Wirthlin
#90. Then when I was in grammar school I played the clarinet, and then, after clarinet I played the flute in college orchestra - besides singing in the college chorus and things like that.
Bobby McFerrin
#91. My wife Elizabeth and I started The Really Terrible Orchestra for people like us who are pretty hopeless musicians who would like to play in an orchestra. It has been a great success. We give performances; we've become the most famous bad orchestra in the world.
Alexander McCall Smith
#92. The Queen and Electric Light Orchestra harmonies are so distinct and fit in our songs so well sometimes, but we don't know how to do them properly.
Nate Ruess
#93. This women's orchestra made a demure picture in their muted dove grays, alright, but they played like they were gowned in scarlet and gold.
Bailey Bristol
#94. The more the ensemble, the duet or the forty piece orchestra, plays as one person, the more it makes people dance, because you're back in the womb. You feel mom's heartbeat. It makes you move. It reminds you of that warm, groovy space you were in.
John Densmore
#95. We are musical notes emanating from the quantum string section of a grand symphonic orchestra.
Kane Freeman
#96. On Mars, where the air is spare - a hundred times less dense than on Earth - someone could hear you scream. But you'd have to really strain to get anyone's attention. On the Red Planet, where the wind is high-pitched and faint, even a symphony orchestra will sound as thin as cheap gruel.
Seth Shostak
#97. When working with an orchestra, you never spend more than 20 minutes per recording session.
Placido Domingo
#98. It can and will be a more powerful sound but the orchestra has far more potential for expressive power. When I hear a great rock band it can make me feel alive, but when I hear a great orchestra it can make me feel human.
Glenn Branca
#99. There are two golden rules for an orchestra: start together and finish together. The public doesn't give a damn what goes on in between.
Thomas Beecham
#100. It's really hard to smile when you play. As a performer, if I ever find myself focusing, it's like, 'Oh no - orchestra face!' It's not attractive at all, so I have to focus on smiling.
Lindsey Stirling
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