Quotes About Orchestra

Then the bow orchestra began to play an apocalyptically beautiful canon, one of those pieces in which, surely, the composer simply transcribed what was given, and trembled in awe of the hand that was guiding him.

I wanted the music to be full, to surround us, to lift us like the swell, so I rented a bloody orchestra. You only live once.

Sounds fell all about me; I vibrated like still water ruffled by wind. Cicadas were out in full force...I had heard them begin at twilight and was struck with the way they actually do start up, like an out of practice orchestra, creaking and grinding and all out of synch. The frogs added their unlocatable notes, which always seem to me to be so arbitrary and anarchistic, and crickets piped in, calling their own tune which they have been calling since the time of Pliny..

One thing I could never stand was to see a filthy dirty old drunky howling away at the filthy songs of his fathers and going blurp blurp in between as it might be a filthy old orchestra in his stinking rotten guts;I could never stand to see anyone like that. whatever his age might be, but more especially when he was real old like this one was.

Suddenly we could all hear, we could all listen, and instead of being caught up in our finite little balls of bullshit, we could all become players in that great universal orchestra again.

To lead an orchestra, you must turn your back on the crowd

You probably think of the orchestra as a heterogeneous mass of instruments producing a confused agreeable mass of sound. You do not listen for details because you have never trained your ears to listen to details.

The novelist is like the conductor of an orchestra, his back to the audience, his face invisible, summoning the experience of music for the people he cannot see. The writer as conductor also gets to compose the music and play all of the instruments, a task less formidable than it seems.

I was playing in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra as principal horn. I was there for some 15 years - one of the most exciting and great musical periods in my life.

A city one loves exists at no matter what distance, and its symphony is sometimes heard more clearly when one is away, as the music of an orchestra is more lucid to an audience that it sounds to the performers on the stage.

Well, monsieur ... a musician always finds it difficult to reply when the answer needs the cooperation of a hundred skilled executants. Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, without an orchestra would be of no great account.

The discords of dragon-laughter are often heard in the orchestra of God.

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.

I have recorded with a 60-piece orchestra, and it gives me satisfaction to have done an album entirely with acoustic instruments.

I first began with the recorder in our community music school. After that, I played horn and participated in the school orchestra.

When working with an orchestra, you never spend more than 20 minutes per recording session.

Bacharach has such a brilliant ear for melody and his music has a completely timeless feel to it; I thought it would be great to do a whole album of his music and to record with a full orchestra and big band which is something I hadn't done before.

In Peru, there is no theatre that produces an annual opera season, and though there is one orchestra in Lima, it's always struggling to survive. We shouldn't have just one orchestra, we should have 15, we should have 50! And you should start to build this from the children.

I admire Tom Ades: he's a brilliant conductor, and he gets just the right hard, brilliant sound from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra for Russian music.

The alarm in the morning? Well, I have an old tape of Carlo Maria Giulini conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in a perfectly transcendent version in Shubert's seventh symphony. And I've rigged it up so that at exactly 7:30 every morning it falls from the ceiling onto my face.

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.

People often ask me if it's scary to make up a song onstage, dictating parts, on the fly, to a full orchestra. Well, no. It doesn't occur to me to worry about that. I have a jazz musician's view of mistakes. If you play a wrong note, you can always make the same mistake again on purpose and make it sound right. Insistence on the mistake can be quite musical. Indeed, "once is a mistake, twice is jazz," a quote often attributed to Miles Davis.

The conductor of an orchestra doesn't make a sound. He depends, for his power, on his ability to make other people powerful.

An orchestra knows during the first two minutes of the first rehearsal whether or not they are going to enjoy the person on the podium.