Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I almost chose the career of an ethnomusicologist because I was so fascinated by that music. It gives a different feeling of time.
The essence of higher instrumental music lays herein that one is able to express in tones that what one is unable to say in words.
Any so-called stimulus program is a ruse. The government can increase its spending only by reducing private spending equivalently.
Nowadays, there are sometimes more producers than there are people in the cast, because it takes that much money to put a show on.
If people have split views about your work, I think it's flattering. I'd rather have them feel something about it than dismiss it.
It should be interesting to see two entirely different ways to treat a story, geared for two entirely different kinds of audience.
What I can't tell is, I don't know if there's a subliminal resistance to the idea of a sequel to 'The Phantom of the Opera' anyway.
'The Phantom of the Opera' is the biggest thing I've ever done, bigger even than 'Cats' which, in itself, I never thought we'd top.
If I were doing five cop shows, I'd probably start struggling to find an identity for each one and struggling to find inspirations.
The showrunner relationship in television is what the director relationship in film, there's really no more important relationship.
I actually started as a singer in Brooklyn, and I lived in a community. To get out of the ghetto of my community, I was a musician.
I find little in the works of Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner and others when they are led by a conductor who functions like a windmill.
I really don't know whether any place contains more pianists than Paris, or whether you can find more asses and virtuosos anywhere.
One should never forget that by actually perfecting one piece one gains and learns more than by starting or half-finishing a dozen.
It started with a simple ring, You became husband and wife, You progressed to being parents And you're still best friends for life.
Biggie and Big Pun were the best storytellers of the '90s. I would get wrapped up in the narrative of what they were talking about.
Art and love survive war, revolution and death. Things continue. What we put into the earth while we are alive continues beyond us.
As far as the execution is concerned ... the most frequent and most serious mistake is to follow the music instead of preceding it.
Music is neither old nor modern: it is either good or bad music, and the date at which it was written has no significance whatever.
I could feel the real interaction between directing and acting, when an actor or an actress really suggests very interesting things.
I had thought everyone in the electronic world would be so laid back, but there's as many cliques and prejudices as any other world.
My shows have room for a bit of improvisation. In a film, you can't have that risk; you can't have someone taking 10 seconds longer.
If music is frozen architecture, then the potpourri is frozen coffee-table gossip... Potpourri is the art of adding apples to pears.
Part of what I enjoy about writing classical music is communicating through the score and collaborating with such amazing musicians.
I don't enjoy traveling in America. I don't like the food, the cars. It is not exotic enough. It all tastes a bit like airline food.
It is necessary to abandon yourself completely, and let the music do as it will with you. All people come to music to seek oblivion.
The first time I heard Ron Whitehead read I felt what I imagine those who heard Abraham Lincoln deliver The Gettysburg Address felt.
Music, of course, is what I hear and something that I more or less live by. It's not an occupation or profession, it's a compulsion.
My idea is that there is music in the air, music all around us; the world is full of it, and you simply take as much as you require.
One bites into the brass mouthpiece of his wooden cudgel, and the other blows his cheeks out on a French horn. Do you call that Art?
I really feel instrumental music can speak - can contain tremendous amounts of information - but it's speaking to your subconscious.
There's no rational reason why opera should exist. It's expensive, time consuming. Yet in some shape or other it has always existed.
We cling nervously to the melody, but we don't handle it freely, we don't really make anything new out of it, we merely overload it.
When I'm writing, sometimes it gets to that place where I feel like the piece is writing itself and I'm trying not to get in the way
I always felt as a horn player, a jam session wasn't satisfying enough for me. I should have been a rhythm section player, actually.
Life would be flat without music. It is the background to all I do. It speaks to the heart in its own special way like nothing else.
What is to reach the heart must come from above; if it does not come from thence, it will be nothing but notes, body without spirit.
Everyone would like to be on Broadway, cause if a show works, you make a great deal of money and it allows you to write other shows.
In not-for-profit theater, you don't worry so much about how the audience is going to react. You want to make them absorb the piece.
Learning is a process whereby a human being, or group, or organization, or society comes to understand and embody nature's patterns.
Mozart tapped the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breathtaking rightness.
When you're composing for somebody, that means you have a boss. You have to do what it takes to, at the end of the day, appease them.
When you get older, you try to get what you wanted as a kid. Maybe you wanted an arcade in your house or Q-Tip rapping on your beats.
I often think of random melodies. And I pretty much hear in my head what I want to do with the orchestra as I'm writing on the piano.
I lived with my teacher and he was my father and he practiced every day so I practiced every day and we practiced every day together.
I get no kick from champagne. Mere alcohol doesn't thrill me at all. So, tell me why should it be true, that I get a kick out of you?
The language of music is common to all generations and nations; it is understood by everybody, since it is understood with the heart.
The profound meaning of music's essential aim... is to produce a communion, a union of man with his fellow man with the Supreme Being
Even if we artists are all very privileged, there's a constant frustration about how to do more or better, and never being satisfied.
The idea comes to me from outside of me - and is like a gift. I then take the idea and make it my own - that is where the skill lies.