Quotes About Interpretation

If all you have is music, then you don't have music

Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra, not choreography to the audience.

For me it was really important to get the essence out of the music for the story and not, sort of, press the music into the service of the whimsical telling of it.

I can show you in music better than I can tell you in words.

Bach is an astronomer, discovering the most marvellous stars. Beethoven challenges the universe. I only try to express the soul and the heart of man.

The architect must not only understand drawing, but music.

I write music, it's performed. After all, my music says it all. It doesn't need historical and hysterical commentaries. In the long run, any words about music are less important than the music.

It's a marvelous feeling when someone says I want to do this song of yours because they've connected to it. That's what I'm after.

My music is not modern, it is merely badly played

I find it so amazing when people tell me that electronic music has no soul. You can't blame the computer. If there's no soul in the music, it's because nobody put it there.

All the music you've ever heard in your life is somewhere in your head. I don't reject that, I use it.

Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.

In the long run, any words about music are less important than the music.

The music is the shining path over which the poet travels to bring his song to the world.

Formalism is music that people don't understand at first hearing.

I take a lot from everywhere. I take from music, architecture, novels, and plays. Anywhere that hits you.

When I don't like a piece of music, I make a point of listening to it more closely

Art is self expression. If you are expressing someone else's personality, that is not art.

Doesn't that fool know I recorded that song because I like it?

I never heard my music played the way I heard it in my head.

We are aware that the conductor is not really making the music, it is making him -- if he is relaxed, open and attuned, then the invisible will take possession of him; through him, it will reach us.

How wonderful opera would be if there were no singers.

These, too, seem to me so ambiguous, so vague, so easily misunderstood in comparison to genuine music, which fills the soul with a thousand things better than words.

It's rare that I ever meet a musician who doesn't agree that music is a language. But it's very rare to meet a musician that really treats it like one.