Quotes and Sayings 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 -
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 -
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 Gromyko -
...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 -
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 -
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. Iyengar -
Faust, the Ninth Symphony, and the will of Adolf Hitler are eternal youth and know neither time nor transience.
-- Baldur von Schirach -
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 -
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 -
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 Bowen -
History is a symphony of echoes heard and unheard. It is a poem with events as verses.
-- Charles Angoff -
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
