Top 69 Quotes About Symphonies
#1. By the combination of lines and colors, under the pretext of some motif taken from nature, I create symphonies and harmonies that represent nothing absolutely real in the ordinary sense of the word but are intended to give rise to thoughts as music does.
Paul Gauguin
#2. I still love how Phil Spector turned teenage experiences into wonderful symphonies, but I find it a little more difficult to put myself in that place.
Joe Goddard
#3. For a man to argue, 'I don't go to church; I pray alone,' is no wiser than if he should say, 'I have no use for symphonies; I believe only in solo music.'
George Arthur Buttrick
#4. What is history? Its beginning is that of the centuries of systematic work devoted to the solution of the enigma of death, so that death itself may eventually be overcome. That is why people write symphonies, and why they discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves.
Boris Pasternak
#5. I tried to resist his overtures, but he plied me with symphonies, quartets, chamber music, and cantatas.
S.J Perelman
#6. I decided to "find myself" in monumental sculpture. Alas, monumental sculpture is a very conservative genre. The cause is the monumentality itself. You can secretly write novels and symphonies. You can secretly experiment on canvas. But just try to hide a twelve-foot-high sculpture!
Sergei Dovlatov
#7. 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
#8. 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
#10. If some of our works are symphonies, then wrapped walkways was chamber music.
Christo
#11. Our life a harp is, with unnumbered strings, And tones and symphonies; but our poor skill Some shallow notes from its great music brings.
John Boyle O'Reilly
#12. In truth, I became a conductor because deep down I wanted to conduct Brahms's four symphonies and Richard Strauss's tone poems.
Zubin Mehta
#13. Beethoven's fourth and seventh symphonies have a certain amount in common. Well, of course they're both written by Beethoven, but besides that, I would say their overall effect and idea is to provide the listener with an incredible sense of joy.
Joshua Bell
#14. Part of what Brahms and others could never quite get over was that Bruckner the composer of epic symphonies behaved, much of the time, like a nincompoop.
Jan Swafford
#15. All these tales of people sitting down and composing symphonies just as though they were writing a letter are very much exaggerated; at least, it isn't that way in my work.
George Gershwin
#16. Playing the Beethoven symphonies, for example, is a consummate experience for a musician because Beethoven speaks so directly to who we are as people.
Joshua Bell
#17. I think that of my 21 symphonies, each has its own place.
Alan Hovhaness
#18. Besides, as much as she loved Bruckner's symphonies, he just couldn't touch a man who had painted his bedroom walls with views of the sea to please her, who gave his precious smiles to her alone, who wept when he watched his daughter sleep.
Lynn Kurland
#19. So long as we refuse to include lottery tickets among the symphonies, or medical bulletins among the overtures, we must refrain from treating the emotions as an aesthetic monopoly of music in general or a certain piece of music in particular.
Eduard Hanslick
#20. There might be symphonies of perfume, Mozarts of musk. Novelists might construct nasal narratives, versifiers sonnets of scent. Sculpture would entail subtleties of shape that only fingers trained through hundreds of millions of years of tactile evolution could discriminate.
Richard Fortey
#21. There was a period after my first solo album came out that about 50 per cent of my work was with symphonies and big bands. We did the Captain and Tennille as well, but it ended up being about 50-50.
Toni Tennille
#22. I would advise my young colleagues, the composers of symphonies, to drop in sometimes at the kindergarten, too. It is there that it is decided whether there will be anybody to understand their works in twenty years' time.
Zoltan Kodaly
#23. My symphonies would have reached Opus 100 if I had but written them down ... Sometimes I am so full of music, and so overflowing with melody, that I find it simply impossible to write down anything.
Robert Schumann
#24. We can't afford big symphonies but we commission works that sound rich and symphonic because of the nature of the instrumentation and the people we work with.
Graeme Murphy
#25. I never listen to music when I am writing. It would be impossible. I listen to Bach in the mornings, mostly choral music; also some Handel, mostly songs and arias; I like Schubert's and Beethoven's chamber music and Sibelius' symphonies; for opera, I listen to Mozart and in recent years Wagner.
Colm Toibin
#26. In my younger days, I used to visit record shops and covet boxed sets of Beethoven symphonies, Wagner operas, Bach cantatas, Mozart piano concertos. Only rarely was I able to find the money for such luxuries.
Michael Dirda
#27. Most Beethoven symphonies require 80 or more instruments, and the late romantics even more.
Neville Marriner
#28. Charlotte Yates didn't especially care for music. All that abstract mooning about. Words, that was what moved people. A good play was worth a thousand symphonies.
Magnus Flyte
#29. I've got great joy from rediscovering Western music. I love Schumann and Chopin, and those amazing symphonies of Bruckner.
John Tavener
#30. When all the decent pleasures are forbidden, there's always ways to get the rotten ones. You don't break into grocery stores after dark and you don't pick your fellow's pockets to buy classical symphonies or fishing tackle, but if it's to get stinking drunk and forget you do.
Ayn Rand
#31. Oh!" cried the young man. "A little deaf child! How sweet! We should adopt her and teach her to write symphonies. She'll be all the rage in town. I'll buy her a powdered wig and a tricorne!
Catherynne M Valente
#32. The symphonies are the things that, as a soloist, I've not gotten to play. I used to travel the world playing concertos, and then I would sit and listen to the symphony.
Joshua Bell
#33. Not only are most of our citizens fathomlessly ignorant of the glories of American literature, a fast-growing percentage of our students are no longer taught much about any works of American art, be they novels, paintings, symphonies or ballets.
Terry Teachout
#34. Although, I am proud of all my Symphonies as they all have something special to say, my particular favourite is the Fifth. As the great Mahler expert Donald Mitchell said that if Mahler had written another Symphony, it would have been my Fifth!
Malcolm Arnold
#35. Beethoven's symphonies are not 'relaxing.' They are the most exciting things that have ever been created by a human being.
Joshua Bell
#36. The degree of talent, the size of the gift, is immaterial. All artists must listen, but not all hear great symphonies, see wide canvasses, conceive complex, character-filled novels. No
matter, the creative act is the same, and it is an act of faith.
Madeleine L'Engle
#37. Did Beethoven create his symphonies for his glorification? I don't believe it. I believe he created them because the music in his soul demanded expression and then all he tried to do was to make them as perfect as he knew how.
W. Somerset Maugham
#38. This is what I want in heaven ... words to become notes and conversations to be symphonies.
Tina Turner
#39. We've been performing with symphonies all of our career and it sounds so wonderful when they play 'My Girl' with the large string section, I want to turn around and look.
Otis Williams
#40. I remembered that Beethoven's symphonies had sometimes been given names ... they should have call [the Fifth] the Vampire, because it simply refused to lie down and die.
Alan Bradley
#41. Jazz tickles your muscles, symphonies stretch your soul.
Paul Whiteman
#42. Empires fall, ids explode, great symphonies are written, and behind all of it is a single instinct that demands satisfaction.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#43. Essentially, all expressions of human nature ever produced, from a caveman's paintings to Mozart's symphonies and Einstein's view of the universe, emerge from the same source: the relentless dynamic toil of large populations of interconnected neurons.
Miguel Nicolelis
#44. Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That's why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that's why they write symphonies..
Jon Krakauer
#45. The nearer I approach the end, the plainer I hear around me the immortal symphonies of the worlds which invite me. It is marvelous, yet simple.
Victor Hugo
#46. Let's say intelligence is your ability to compose poetry, symphonies, do art, math and science. Chimps can't do any of that, yet we share 99 percent DNA. Everything that we are, that distinguishes us from chimps, emerges from that one-percent difference.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#47. Sometimes I wish that I could sing or dance or paint or compose symphonies or build cathedrals to express somehow what all of this means to me. I wish I were a priest or a robin or a child or a sunset.
Robert Benson
#48. If I weren't the way I am, I shouldn't write my symphonies.
Gustav Mahler
#49. Now I'm having the time of my life being on the road with one of the world's all-time great big bands, and performing with symphonies. I wouldn't trade it for anything.
Doc Severinsen
#50. I love classical music and often listen to symphonies or opera in the morning.
William Mapother
#51. I attempt to compose symphonies, although it is clear to me that logically it is pointless.
Alfred Schnittke
#52. We cannot, after all, judge a biography by its length, by the number of pages in it; we must judge by the richness of the contents ... Sometimes the 'unfinisheds' are among the most beautiful symphonies.
Viktor E. Frankl
#53. World is sensation. We drift in an ocean of sensory stimuli: motion, color, texture, shape, heat, cold, natural symphonies of sound, an infinite number of scents, tastes beyond the human ability to catalogue. Nothing but sensation endures. Living things all die. Great cities do not last.
Dean Koontz
#54. Moving pictures need sound as much as Beethoven symphonies need lyrics,
Charlie Chaplin
#56. Why is composing symphonies tough? I don't know. It's just very few people in the world can do it well. And I think that's the case with upfront design. It is very hard to do well.
Martin Fowler
#57. Last year, more Americans went to symphonies than went to baseball games. This may be viewed as an alarming statistic, but I think that both baseball and the country will endure.
John F. Kennedy
#58. I hear entire symphonies, oratorios, in my head, but I can't write a note.
Alan Dean Foster
#59. 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
#61. An artist should make concessions to the listener. That is why Bruckner dedicated one of his symphonies to the Good Lord.
Karl Kraus
#62. In concertos, I stand up, and I conduct with the bow when I'm not playing. During symphonies, I sit, but sometimes I stop playing to conduct. Being seated in a section allows me to feel more like we're playing chamber music, which is how I like to approach it.
Joshua Bell
#63. It's a fundamental, social attitude that the 1% supports symphonies and operas and doesn't support Johnny learning to program hip-hop beats. When I put it like that, it sounds like, 'Well, yeah,' but you start to think, 'Why not, though?' What makes one more valuable than another?
David Byrne
#64. I always like to sing barefoot, but when I first started doing these dates with the symphonies, I of course thought I should clean up my act, being a Jewish girl from Long Island with a little bit of a trucker mouth. So I wore a gown and some high heels.
Idina Menzel
#65. Why we are here: To tremble at the terrible beauty of the stars, to shed a tear at the perfection of Beethoven's symphonies, and to crack a cold one now and then.
David Letterman
#66. Remember Haydn's 104 symphonies. Not all of them were great. But there were 104 of them.
Raymond Carver
#67. Mathematics is an activity governed by the same rules imposed upon the symphonies of Beethoven, the paintings of DaVinci, and the poetry of Homer.
Edward Kasner
#68. The smallest component of the human molecule is a vibration - the equivalent to a musical note. Taking the time to learn more self-awareness at this level creates life experiences beyond that of all the greatest symphonies ever heard
Gary Hopkins
#69. When my heart yearn for silence in a crowd full of cheerful people, thats not the lonliness i seek but want to feel the rustling of my abandoned desires pouring upon the broken hearts. All the noise i want to here now is the symphony of love and of healing.
Annie Ali
