Quotes About Orchestras

#1. I'm more authoritarian with the orchestras than I used to be. You need to hold your ground, I've noticed, or you'll be swept aside.

Laurence Equilbey

#2. But still as compared to many, many orchestras in the world, I think you find a lot more new music and living composers on our programs than many other places.

Michael Tilson Thomas

#3. Ergo, because of the money problem, it is probable that our orchestras will soon go down in quality.

Lara St. John

#4. In the period from 1945 to 1960, the number of orchestras in the country doubled, book sales rose some 250 percent, and art museums opened in most major cities. Ballet was quick to catch up: between 1958 and 1969 the number of ballet companies nationwide with more than twenty members nearly tripled.

Jennifer Homans

#5. I studied music all the way through college, but as soon as I graduated from university, I got straight into London and got straight into film music. So really my experiences have been being around the orchestras in London and being around the people who work in film music.

Steven Price

#6. It is very gratifying to see the music from 'The Lord of the Rings' trilogy find a new life on the concert stage as it is performed by different orchestras and choruses throughout the world.

Howard Shore

#7. When facing symphonic orchestras which have played some works five thousands times, you have nothing to do.

Placido Domingo

#8. I will never master this craft. Orchestras are very, very forthcoming with me.

David Ogden Stiers

#9. I've done shows with orchestras, and I like writing with orchestras.

Bryan Ferry

#10. 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

#11. The biggest difference between U.S and most European big cities is that in a place like London, for instance, there are five orchestras, and there's a bloody competition between these five orchestras.

Esa-Pekka Salonen

#12. Composers love to write for symphony orchestras because the symphony is the Rolls Royce of musical instruments.

David Del Tredici

#13. To this day I am indulgent toward orchestras that are trying to lift themselves in the world, while critics are busy assuring them that they are not the Vienna Philharmonic and never will be.

Robertson Davies

#14. For many years, the government of Canada has massively supported orchestras and the arts in general.

Lara St. John

#15. There was a time, from 1935-1946, when teenagers and young adults danced to jazz-orientated bands. When jazz orchestras dominated pop charts and when influential clarinettists were household names. This was the swing era.

Scott Yanow

#16. I've watched the demise of the Hollywood orchestra, the house orchestras of the big studios.

Skitch Henderson

#17. The symphonic orchestras have sponsors, people who give them endowments, and I think it should be the same way with jazz - because this is a national treasure.

Lee Morgan

#18. Orchestras have often been used to conjure up the natural world: Swans, sharks, trout, but not, as far as I know, the often maligned jellyfish.

Bill Bailey

#19. Next year I'm going to be a guesting soloist with orchestras all over Europe, to start off with.

Keith Emerson

#20. I also work with the regular orchestras in Munich, Germany and other similar orchestras.

Skitch Henderson

#21. Concert-going has become much less the thing to do, while people are still going to opera. This might be a harsh judgment, but it could easily happen that orchestras could slowly atrophy.

Jeffrey Tate

#22. The problem is, when you're working with orchestras, you only get the orchestra for about two hours before the performance to pull it all together, and that doesn't sound like a real collaboration.

Andrew Bird

#23. There are three orchestras in Munich, all world-quality, in a city of one million. Yet every hall is full.

Zubin Mehta

#24. I was never that into the movies. Never. Even as a youngster. I became interested in movie music only because of the studio orchestras in Hollywood.

John Williams

#25. They're always so serious, the orchestras, you know? It's always a fun contrast of that song and the genre of music. And me.

Idina Menzel

#26. I endeavor that all orchestras I conduct sound Central European.

Zubin Mehta

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

Zubin Mehta

#28. It's not all that different with the orchestra. There are orchestras that seem to be encased in dough, so that first you have to break through the normal routine, and clear out the openings.

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

#29. As major orchestras around the world are gripped in various kinds of crises and upheaval, we need to be sure that we are bringing up this new generation.

James Levine

#30. With American orchestras, in particular, because they play in such huge halls, getting a true pianissimo is very hard.

Esa-Pekka Salonen

#31. I grew up playing in youth orchestras, so they were my most treasured memories, so to be in front of an orchestra playing my own material would be incredible.

Laura Mvula

#32. I went to study some orchestration stuff because I got so inspired working with all the orchestras.

Dido Armstrong

#33. I've worked with some great orchestras and amazing classical musicians, but I don't like the conceptualization of classical music as an elitist form of art.

Serj Tankian

#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. Orchestras have become used to the emphasis on the separation of layers, of the ultimate precision and clarity.

Esa-Pekka Salonen

#36. Orchestras only need to be sworn at, and a German is consequently at an advantage with them, as English profanity, except in America, has not gone beyond a limited technology of perdition.

George Bernard Shaw

#37. I did the one concert, and I was not bitten by the conducting bug, and I thought I was done, but then the phone started to ring, and gradually, over time, I started conducting more and more. Now a third of my performances are with orchestras.

Bobby McFerrin

#38. For a short while she considered the idea of orchestral courtesy. Certainly one should avoid giving political offence: German orchestras, of course, used to be careful about playing Wagner abroad, at least in some countries, choosing instead German composers who were somewhat more ... apologetic.

Alexander McCall Smith

#39. Orchestras are not used to playing the kind of stuff jazz musicians like to play. It requires a lot of rehearsal and recording time, so it's much easier to do on a synth or sampler. So, we came up with that idea.

Eberhard Weber

#40. Musical 'fusion' projects have earned themselves a bad name, but that's mainly because they often involve pop artists conscripting orchestras to play unimaginative backdrops to their acts. What's really exciting is when you spark off a dialogue between very different musical forces.

Charles Hazlewood

#41. Way back in the old days, say in Europe of the Middle Ages, you had an aristocracy, and they could afford to pay for musicians. The kings and queens had musicians in the castles, and that developed into symphony orchestras and what we call "Classical music" now.

Pete Seeger

#42. I was raised a musician and I played classic music, violin, in orchestras and music comedy theaters, I have music running around in my head all the time, and if I hear music that's too interesting, I have to pay attention to it.

Larry Wall

#43. Orchestras seem content to be museums now, even as they wring their hands about dropping subscription sales and graying listeners.

Allan Kozinn

#44. I often conduct an orchestra in my sleep; my orchestras are so huge that the back desks of the violas vanish into the horizon. And everything is so wonderful.

Jean Sibelius

#45. Symphonic orchestras have almost become a glut in the market.

Skitch Henderson

#46. What I really enjoy about writing for orchestras is realizing that - and it's kind of self-evident - but the fact that they are 48 individuals. It's not, you know, a preset on a keyboard. It's all these people who have opinions and who are making decisions about how to play.

Jonny Greenwood

#47. I started directing chamber orchestras, then adding bigger pieces, adding winds, adding small symphonies. I've always loved chamber music, and I've done a lot.

Joshua Bell

#48. I want to work with the big orchestras. I want to have a big family.

Gustavo Dudamel

#49. When I lived in rural Oxfordshire, I was walking home across a field when I stroked a cow. The damn thing butted me in the orchestras.

Mark Lawrenson

#50. Women play cellos and violins in symphony orchestras. They're playing Beethoven and Bach. What do you mean they can't play rock and roll?

Joan Jett

#51. I think that there's a lot more freedom in the low budget, the independent films where, unfortunately, you don't have the money, necessarily, to get the orchestras in there to play a lot of stuff. But, you have a lot more freedom, very often.

Danny Elfman

#52. For Daisy was young and her artificial world was redolent of orchids and pleasant, cheerful snobbery and orchestras which set the rhythm of the year, summing up the sadness and suggestiveness of life in new tunes.

F Scott Fitzgerald

#53. 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

#54. While there used to be one or two Pops orchestras, now there are all kinds of European orchestras that suddenly look upon this as a golden wand that can enable them to make money recording this music.

Skitch Henderson

#55. It seems always to have been difficult to have been a New York Philharmonic conductor because of the nature of New York. We are in direct competition with the great orchestras in the world who come to play in our hall or in Carnegie, and we are constantly compared. I think that 's a good thing.

Zubin Mehta

#56. I worry about being a fogy and just writing for orchestras. Like, really, I should be doing more electronic stuff, I feel. Laptops as part of the orchestra, and installation sound, and speakers.

Jonny Greenwood

#57. I grew up listening to hipster jazz and classical records ... we went and watched ballet and orchestras - lots of cool stuff. Which I'm really grateful for - it's pretty nice being introduced to that when you're little.

Courtney Barnett

#58. People say that having three orchestras is a crazy life, but it's better because you have three families. I want to have my own kids very soon. In future, I still want to conduct a lot, but less, to be with my family.

Gustavo Dudamel