A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.
[As a kid] I felt it was really weird that music schools behaved like a conveyor belt to make performers for those symphony orchestras. If you were really good and practiced your violin for a few hours a day for ten years you might be invited to this VIP elite club. For me music was not about that. It is about freedom and expression and individuality and impulsiveness and spontaneity. It wasn't so Apollonian; it was more Dionysian.
Having to talk destroys the symphony of silence.
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.
What is the universe? The universe is a symphony of vibrating strings. . . we are nothing but melodies. We are nothing but cosmic music played out on vibrating strings and membranes.
. . . 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.
Karen rowed for what the venerable American shell builder George Pocock called `the symphony of motion. ' As dawn breaks over the river, the shell is lifted from its rack out into the morning. On another rack the oars hang ready to be greased and slipped into the locks. Then, awakened to the river and the feel of the oars, the oarsmen blend in fulfillment of the shell. The symphony is not of competition. It is the synchronous motion over water, the harmonic flexing of wood and muscle, where each piece of equipment and every oarsman is both essential to, and the limit of motion itself.
It is not enough to do a desktop exercise of a Beethoven symphony. You need to practice with an orchestra. The musicians need to read the notes. Otherwise it will be a disaster.
A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything.
Symphony musicians are not trained in improvising, certainly not in a jazz style.
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.
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.
I don't work with an outline, except a vague one in my head, a general idea of character, place, arc. . . I'm like a composer with a symphony in their head: I can hear the music, I just have to figure out how to put it down on paper. But I don't always know where my stories are going when I begin.
Actors want to work with you but they want you to do their thing. Actors, whom I love with a blind partiality, sometimes they want to be soloists in the symphony, not a part of the orchestra.
I think there's a poet who wrote once a tragedy by Shakespeare, a symphony by Beethoven and a thunderstorm are based on the same elements. I think that's a beautiful line.
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.
Our biological rhythms are the symphony of the cosmos.
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.
In string theory, all particles are vibrations on a tiny rubber band; physics is the harmonies on the string; chemistry is the melodies we play on vibrating strings; the universe is a symphony of strings, and the 'Mind of God' is cosmic music resonating in 11 dimensional hyperspace.
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.