Quotes About Music

'Geronimo' was a huge amount of work. That involved 80-piece orchestras and Indians and Tuvans and all kinds of crazy people on that thing. That's a real circus, that score.

Most of the time, I'll be conducting the orchestra, but there will be some pieces that I'll be playing an instrument as well, just because I love playing. There's pieces where I want to grab an instrument and play with the rest of the group, like 'The Light of the Seven,' for example; I would love to play the piano for that.

I played in orchestras all through high school and taught myself how to play guitar.

In western classical music with an orchestra, you focus the orchestra on melodies and harmony. In African music, the biggest focus is on rhythms and counter-rhythms - the complexity of rhythms.

It was a huge honour to play at the Palladium with the BBC Concert Orchestra.

If the orchestra's not enjoying itself, the concerto will not succeed, with the players confined to using half an inch of bow.

Since my father's death, a lot of people have made it clear that they're not ready to give up the music. For me, it's a big, fat gift. I get to sing with a big orchestra and get to sing orchestrations that will never be old.

When I was going to high school, in the high school band we would play these kind of hour-long concerts for our parents. All the parents would come to the gymnasium, and the band would play an hour-long kind of orchestra piece. 'Synchestra' is supposed to be similar, like a high school band orchestra piece.

Normally when you write for an orchestra, you think about melody and harmony and countermelody.

Right from the 17th century, composers who have taken up music as their means of livelihood went through a hard time financially. They were paid only for commissioned works and public performances. And, when their music became famous, orchestras in other cities and countries would pay a small amount to copy the music.

I used to sing classical music to the flowers in the garden and imagine they were all different parts of the orchestra. It used to really annoy the neighbours.

We're more about other things over odd timings: orchestration, composition, horn/vocal arrangements - that's where we get super weird.

I can almost see the music. It comes in the form of colors - colors jump out at me, and that translates into notes. They come fully formed: the orchestration parts, not just the melodies. Even though they're not always the right ones to use, the initial idea comes like that.

I don't play beats. I hate playing beats. I'm an orchestration drummer. I'm a musical drummer.

I've learned a lot from the masters of orchestration, like Ravel and Stravinsky.

Listen, there's been times in my life like the two years that I only listened to jazz, and probably nothing after 1966. When I went to the Manhattan School of Music, the library didn't have anything after 1966. In order to get good at that, I had to tunnel-vision and focus on that.

I kept listening to albums where I'd hear this very joyful sound - and it was always the glockenspiel. Then I ordered one online, and I figured out how to play it.

I remember ordering records out of the Dischord catalog in the '80s, and there would be a handwritten note.

We still have so far to go as a country. People don't like to listen to women or take orders from them. I feel that a lot as a woman playing music.

I had a dream of music and art and the big city in which I would get lost, where no one would know me and I wouldn't know anyone, where I would work at some ordinary job, and if one day I got up in the morning and decided I wasn't going to go to work anymore, no one would ask questions.

I used to think I was ordinary and just like everybody else, and I am, but there is something about being in a band. It's not for everyone.

I used to watch my father play the guitar and sing when I was a little boy. By the time I was 11, I knew what I wanted to do. My father really couldn't afford to spend $12 for a guitar for me, but he did. It was like an ordinary family spending $500 for a kid's gift.

Maybe I'm a dreamer, but I think the ordinary guy has just as much right to say 'This is a good song' as somebody who is in the music business.

I always thought that one day I would be somebody. I would be successful in music, and I would have fans that cared about my music. At the same time, I really feel like an ordinary guy; I have been an ordinary guy forever.