quotes about Symphony
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Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for 45 minutes.
-- Aaron Copland -
I hear entire symphonies, oratorios, in my head, but I can't write a note.
-- Alan Dean Foster -
I think that of my 21 symphonies, each has its own place.
-- Alan Hovhaness -
No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them.
-- Alan Watts -
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Think about a piece of music - some great symphony - we don't expect it to get better as it develops, or that its whole purpose is to reach the final crescendo. The joy is found in listening to the music in each moment.
-- Alan Watts -
Proportion ... You can't help thinking about it in these London streets, where it doesn't exist ... It's like listening to a symphony of cats to walk along them. Senseless discords and a horrible disorder all the way ... We need no barbarians from outside; they're on the premises, all the time.
-- Aldous Huxley -
Having to talk destroys the symphony of silence.
-- Aleister Crowley -
We did experiments with the Boston Symphony for many years where we measured the angles of incidence of sound arriving at the ears of the audience, then took the measurements back to MIT and analyzed them.
-- Amar Bose -
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You can chase a Beethoven symphony all your life and never catch up.
-- Andre Previn -
Greece is a sort of American vassal; the Netherlands is the country of American bases that grow like tulip bulbs; Cuba is the main sugar plantation of the American monopolies; Turkey is prepared to kowtow before any United States proconsul and Canada is the boring second fiddle in the American symphony.
-- Andrei GromykoSource : New York Herald Tribune, June 30, 1953.
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...the reader who plucks a book from her shelf only once is as deprived as the listener who, after attending a single performance of a Beethoven symphony, never hears it again.
-- Anne Fadiman -
What I really enjoy is not you; it's something that's greater than both you and me. It is something that I discovered, a kind of symphony, a kind of orchestra that plays one melody in your presence, but when you depart, the orchestra doesn't stop. When I meet someone else, it plays another melody, which is also very delightful. And when I'm alone, it continues to play.
-- Anthony de Mello -
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I've been playing music all my life, from being a choir soloist at Symphony Hall as a youngster to playing in bands through high school and college at Kent State. Went in the service at 17, out before I was 21.
-- Arthur Godfrey -
The seasons are what a symphony ought to be: four perfect movements in harmony with each other.
-- Arthur Rubinstein -
A man of intellect is like an artist who gives a concert without any help from anyone else, playing on a single instrument--a piano, say, which is a little orchestra in itself. Such a man is a little world in himself; and the effect produced by various instruments together, he produces single-handed, in the unity of his own consciousness. Like the piano, he has no place in a symphony; he is a soloist and performs by himself--in soli tude, it may be; or if in the company with other instruments, only as principal; or for setting the tone, as in singing.
-- Arthur Schopenhauer -
When I do an operation, it's half a dozen people. When it goes beautifully, it's like a symphony, with everybody playing their part.
-- Atul Gawande -
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Whether it’s a symphony or a coal mine, all work is an act of creating and comes from the same source: from an inviolate capacity to see through one’s own eyes-which means: the capacity to perform a rational identification- which means: the capacity to see, to connect and to make what had not been seen, connected and made before.
-- Ayn Rand -
Yoga is like music: the rhythm of the body, the melody of the mind, and the harmony of the soul create the symphony of life.
-- B.K.S. IyengarSource : B.K.S. Iyengar (2006). “Astadala Yogamala (Collected Works), Volume 6”, p.129, Allied Publishers
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Faust, the Ninth Symphony, and the will of Adolf Hitler are eternal youth and know neither time nor transience.
-- Baldur von SchirachSource : "The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership". Book by Joachim C. Fest , p. 221, 1999.
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New Year's Eve, we're going to be doing a concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra in Symphony Hall. It makes me feel good, because of all the people they could have had, they wanted me! We do have to do a little work with the rhythm section.
-- Barbara Cook -
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It is the tuning of the universe... It's as if at the beginning of the symphony God turns up the volume just a tiny bit.
-- Benjamin Zander -
Few tears will be shed over the demise of the East German army, but what about East Germany’s eighty symphony orchestras, bound to lose some subsidies? Or the whole East German system, which covered everyone in a security blanket from day care to health care, from housing to education? Some people are beginning to express, if ever so slightly, nostalgia for that Berlin Wall.
-- Bob Simon -
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 -
It is still true that it is easier to compose a poem in the form of a manual for adjusting a VCR than it is to write a piece using just tuning as a symphony.
-- Brian Ferneyhough -
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If he's a true symphony artist, he knows better than that because he knows that the only truly creative musician is the jazz musician.
-- Buddy Rich -
To have everything written for you It's not really creating. That's why I think symphony drummers are so limited. They 're limited to exactly what was played a hundred years before them by a thousand other drummers.
-- Buddy Rich -
your concert-goer, though he feed upon symphony as a lamb upon milk, is no true lover if he play no instrument. Your true lover does more than admire the muse; he sweats a little in her service.
-- Catherine Drinker BowenSource : Catherine Drinker Bowen (1939). “Friends and fiddlers”
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History is a symphony of echoes heard and unheard. It is a poem with events as verses.
-- Charles Angoff -
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the grace is being able to like rock music, symphony music, jazz … anything that contains the original energy of joy.
-- Charles Bukowski -
I don't know if this is true to you but for me sometimes it gets so bad that anything else say like looking at a bird on an overhead power line seems as great as a Beethoven symphony. then you forget it and you're back again.
-- Charles Bukowski -
I'm too busy playing. When I'm playing I don't pay attention to who's listening. When I was listening I listened to symphony orchestras, Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Stravinsky. You don't listen to one instrument; you listen to music.
-- Charles Mingus -
When asked by a grumpily puzzled professor what "rules" he followed, Debussy is said to have retorted, mon plaisir "whatever I please" and he further claimed that more was to be gained by watching the sun rise than by listening to the Pastoral Symphony. Although such remarks were intended to shock, they contain a core of Debussyan verity...
-- Claude Debussy -
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Symphony is the ability to see the big picture, connect the dots, combine disparate things into something new. Visual artists in particular are good at seeing how the pieces come together. I experienced this myself by trying to learn to draw.
-- Daniel H. Pink -
Why learn a number like pi to so many decimal places? The answer I gave then as I do now is that pi is for me an extremely beautiful and utterly unique thing. Like the Mona Lisa or a Mozart symphony, pi is its own reason for loving it.
-- Daniel TammetSource : Daniel Tammet (2007). “Born On A Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant”, p.185, Simon and Schuster
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I don't see myself necessarily having a burning desire to write a symphony.
-- Danny Elfman -
As a composer and as a musician I'm a true believer - and this is not to be overly diplomatic - I'm a believer that there's artistry in everything from a lawn gnome to a desk chair to a symphony to an Andy Warhol painting. There's art in absolutely everything.
-- Darren Criss -
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When I was 20, Shostakovich was my favorite composer. I still find his Fifth Symphony wonderful, with its outstanding themes and rhythms. That's the piece that made me want to be a classical composer.
-- Dave Brubeck -
I learned from my uncle that jazz, like symphony music, was built to last.
-- David Amram -
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 -
Composers love to write for symphony orchestras because the symphony is the Rolls Royce of musical instruments.
-- David Del Tredici -
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Abolishing the book is like abolishing the symphony, or sonata form, or the sonnet, or the wall painting.
-- David GelernterSource : Big Think Interview, bigthink.com.
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Writing a play, you start with less, so more is demanded of you. It's as if you have to not only write a symphony, but invent the instruments as well.
-- David Ives -
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 -
Our biological rhythms are the symphony of the cosmos, music embedded deep within us to which we dance, even when we can't name the tune.
-- Deepak Chopra -
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Our biological rhythms are the symphony of the cosmos.
-- Deepak Chopra -
Life is everywhere. The earth is throbbing with it - it's like music. The plants, the creatures, the ones we see, the ones we don't see, it's like one, big, pulsating symphony.
-- Diane FrolovSource : "Fictional character: Maggie O'Connell". "Northern Exposure" ("Mite Makes Right"), Season 5, Episode 13, 1994.
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Only life suffered can transform a symphony from a collection of notes into a message of humanity.
-- Dimitris Mitropoulos -
Many consider that Shostakovich is the greatest 20th-century composer. In his 15 symphonies, 15 quartets, and in other works he demonstrated mastery of the largest and most challenging forms with music of great emotional power and technical invention...All his works are marked by emotional extremes - tragic intensity, grotesque and bizarre wit, humour, parody, and savage sarcasm.
-- Dmitri Shostakovich -
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The majority of my symphonies are tombstones.
-- Dmitri ShostakovichSource : "Testimony" by Dmitri Shostakovich, translated by Antonina W. Bouis, New York: Limelight, (p. 156), 2004.
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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 -
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 HanslickSource : Eduard Hanslick (1957). “Vom Musikalisch-Schönen”, Bobbs-Merrill Company
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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 KasnerSource : Edward Kasner, James Newman (2013). “Mathematics and the Imagination”, p.362, Courier Corporation
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A thing of orchestrated hell-a terrible symphony of light and flame.
-- Edward R. Murrow -
Making a garden is somehow like conducting a symphony - different plants come forward at different times and you need to think very carefully about their placement in relation to each other.
-- Elisabeth Murdoch -
Funny thing, your brain, how it always functions on one level or another. How, even stuck in some sort of subconcious limbo, it works your lungs, your muscle twitches, your heart, in fact, in symphony with your heart, allowing it to feel love. Pain. Jealousy. Guilt. I wonder if it’s the same for people, lost in comas. Is there really such a thing
-- Ellen Hopkins -
When I was to come to Washington the first time as Music Director of the Boston Symphony, Mrs. Johnson phoned us to find out if they could give us a party and who we would like to meet.
-- Erich Leinsdorf -
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Muti is going to do the Alpine Symphony this year. He will do it well because it is not very well known.
-- Eugene Ormandy -
My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.
-- Fernando Pessoa -
I'm familiar to people. They feel comfortable with me. I started in live television. I perform live all the time. I sing with the piano. I sing with a symphony. I can sit and ask questions. I can listen. I'm very comfortable in most situations.
-- Florence Henderson -
Consciousness is somehow a by-product of the simultaneous, high frequency firing of neurons in different parts of the brain. It's the meshing of these frequencies that generates consciousness, just as tones from individual instruments produce the rich, complex, & seamless sounds of a symphony orchestra
-- Francis Crick -
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I would never have become music director of the Chicago Symphony, which would have been an extremely sad loss.
-- Georg SoltiSource : Georg Solti, Harvey Sachs (1997). “Memoirs”, Knopf
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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 -
The Russian composers, especially, tricked the symphony orchestra into the kind of dynamic, rhythmic thing
-- Gerry Mulligan -
I would think, of all the saxophones, the baritone would be the most logical instrument if anybody was adding a voice to the symphony orchestra.
-- Gerry Mulligan -
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The first reason for starting to do the symphony concerts was to play this new piece of mine.
-- Gerry Mulligan -
u201Che G-minor Symphony consists of eight remarkable measures surrounded by a half-hour of banality.
-- Glenn Gould -
Symphony musicians are not trained in improvising, certainly not in a jazz style.
-- Gunther SchullerSource : "Listen Back To A 1988 Conversation With Composer Gunther Schuller". "Fresh Air", www.npr.org. June 22, 2015.
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A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything.
-- Gustav Mahler -
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To write a symphony is, for me, to construct a world.
-- Gustav Mahler -
If I weren't the way I am, I shouldn't write my symphonies.
-- Gustav Mahler -
For me to rehearse with a children's orchestra a Mahler symphony was to really work. We had three or four weeks of rehearsal with the orchestra, every day eight or nine hours, putting the First together. I had been conducting Tchaikovsky a lot and Beethoven, but Mahler was different.
-- Gustavo Dudamel -
It's a physical challenge. It's a spiritual challenge. I'm studying almost every day a different symphony, not returning to any one for a week.
-- Gustavo Dudamel -
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We are each but a quarter note in a grand symphony.
-- Guy Laliberte -
The very day I purchased it, I christened my guitar as my monophonic symphony, six string orchestra.
-- Harry Chapin -
And we would play together, like fine musicians should, And it would sound like music, and the music would sound good. But in real life I'm stuck with that same old formula, me and my monophonic symphony, six string orchestra.
-- Harry Chapin -
Life is a symphony, and the action of every person in this life is the playing of his particular part in the music.
-- Hazrat Inayat Khan -
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The deeper men go into life, the deeper is their conviction that this life is not all. It is an unfinished symphony. A day may round out an insect's life, and a bird or a beast needs no tomorrow. Not so with him who knows that he is related to God and has felt the power of an endless life.
-- Henry Ward Beecher -
The word stands for the body, but the symphony stands for the spirit.
-- Hildegard of Bingen -
A cap of good acid costs five dollars and for that you can hear the Universal Symphony with God singing solo and Holy Ghost on drums.
-- Hunter S. Thompson -
I have been told that a young would-be composer wrote to Mozart asking advice about how to compose a symphony. Mozart responded that a symphony was a complex and demanding form and it would be better to start with something simpler. The young man protested, 'But, Herr Mozart, you wrote symphonies when you were younger than I am now.' Mozart replied, 'I never asked how.
-- Isaac Asimov -
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For in the immediate world, everything is to be discerned, for him who can discern it, and central and simply, without either dissection into science, or digestion into art, but with the whole of consciousness, seeking to perceive it as it stands: so that the aspect of a street in sunlight can roar in the heart of itself as a symphony, perhaps as no symphony can: and all of consciousness is shifted from the imagined, the revisive, to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiation of what is.
-- James Agee -
The Chicago Symphony is considered the greatest orchestra in the world.
-- Jane Byrne -
At every moment, each instrument knew what to play. Its little bit. But none could see the whole thing like this, all at once, only its own part. Just like life. Each person was like a line of music, but nobody knew what the symphony sounded like. Only the conductor had the whole score.
-- Janet Fitch -
In my experience of vegan food it tends to be a symphony of beige.
-- Jay Rayner -
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For an instant God opens his door and His orchestra plays the Fifth Symphony,
-- Jean Sibelius -
The framework of a symphony must be so strong that it forces you to follow it, regardless of the environment and circumstances.
-- Jean SibeliusSource : Jean Sibelius' remarks to Jussi Jalas, October 1, 1939.
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We must realize our own talents and, having realized, accept them; and play on them like a symphony in which all other instruments are harmonized to make a better universe.
-- Jeane Dixon -
We in the "developed" world seem to have many auditory strategies that insulate us from the presence of silence, simplicity, and solitude. When I return to Western culture after time in desert, mountain or forest, I discover how we have filled our world with a multiplicity of noises, a symphony of forgetfulness that keeps our won thoughts and realizations, feelings and intuitions out of audible range.
-- Joan HalifaxSource : Joan Halifax (2007). “The Fruitful Darkness: A Journey Through Buddhist Practice and Tribal Wisdom”, p.38, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
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The drama, like the symphony, does not teach or prove anything.
-- John Millington SyngeSource : John Millington Synge, Ann Saddlemyer (1998). “Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays”, p.28, Oxford University Press, USA
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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 -
Loneliness is the theme, and I play it like a symphony, in endless variations.
-- Jonathan Tropper -
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A friend of mine tells me that a Beethoven symphony can solve for him a problem of conduct. I've no doubt that it does so simply by giving him a sense of the tragedy and the greatness of human destiny, which makes his personal anxieties seem small, which throws them into a new proportion.
-- Joyce Cary -
God comes to us in theater in the way we communicate with each other, whether it be a symphony orchestra, or a wonderful ballet, or a beautiful painting, or a play. It's a way of expressing our humanity.
-- Julie Harris -
It took me the bulk of my twenties to write one book about a family of alligator wrestlers. Whereas somebody like Steve Martin is releasing his latest banjo symphony, having just completed another movie and acclaimed, best-selling novel.
-- Karen Russell -
A novel is really like a symphony where instrument after instrument has to come in at its own time, and no other.
-- Katherine Anne Porter -
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I'm fine." It's a lie. I am not fine. My head is a symphony of pain, a sadistic master maestro conducting an opus of excruciating, devastating perfecting.
-- Kiersten White -
And at the same time, I had my very first concert at the age of 16. I hadn't heard a symphony orchestra before, and I was so deeply impressed I said I have to be a conductor.
-- Kurt Masur -
In South America, I heard the 8th Symphony of Beethoven. And the young conductor thought, Beethoven must be heroic. But this is piece which shouldn't be heroic. And this was such a misunderstanding, such a deep misunderstanding.
-- Kurt Masur -
And yet, something tied them together, strong than any of that, something with the power to conduct her blood and breath like a symphony, so that anything she did to fight against it felt like discord, like disharmony with her self.
-- Laini Taylor -