Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Increasingly I think of myself as some strange and solitary conductor, introduced to a group of very dynamic musicians who happen to be my characters, and I have no idea how they are going to play together, and I have certainly no idea how I am going to put manners on them.
I prefer it when the conductor follows me. It is more difficult to work with a conductor who does not listen - even if I understand that sometimes it makes sense when one person is ruling everything. But for bel canto, I have to have a conductor who listens and supports me.
I conceived of an instrument that would create sound without using any mechanical energy, like the conductor of an orchestra. The orchestra plays mechanically, using mechanical energy; the conductor just moves his hands, and his movements have an effect on the music artistry.
In high school, we had a really great jazz program that I finally was able to be a part of. They only wanted instrumentalists; they didn't want any singers. But I made my way in, and I remember the conductor of the band wrote a lot of arrangements and asked me what I wanted to sing.
I think it's a very important collaboration between the conductor and the orchestra - especially when the conductor is one more member of the orchestra in the way that you are leading, but also respecting, feeling and building the same way for all the players to understand the music.
I was always pretty decent at fast stick work or doing stuff that seems impressive that's not really; I was pretty tasteful and had good ideas musically. But I had a terrible sense of tempo, which is like being a blind painter. The conductor would just rip into me, and it lasted for years.
Born a slave, Harriet Tubman was determined not to remain one. She escaped from her owners in Maryland on the Underground Railroad in 1849 and then fearlessly returned thirteen times to help guide family members and others to freedom as the most famous conductor of the Underground Railroad.
A lot of people think the orchestra is playing and the conductor doesn't do very much, but the conductor's the person that gives shape to the music, gets the phrasing, and if he has really fine musicians in solo spots, the question is does he try to help them phrase, or does he let them go?
It seems always to have been difficult to have been a New York Philharmonic conductor because of the nature of New York. We are in direct competition with the great orchestras in the world who come to play in our hall or in Carnegie, and we are constantly compared. I think that 's a good thing.
The life of any musician really doesn't fall into a normal schedule at all. Every week there are different rehearsals, different days and nights of performances, so we don't have a particular pattern that we can follow. For a conductor, it is a little bit worse because we have to allow for traveling.
Before Liszt, a conductor was someone who just facilitated the performance, who would keep people together or beat the time, indicate the entries. After Liszt, that was no longer the case; a conductor was someone who shaped the music in an intense musical way, who played the orchestra as an instrument.
I took the first James Kelman novel, 'The Bus Conductor Hines', home to my dad. I thought, 'My dad will like this; it's written in Scots.' But my dad said: 'I can't read that.' He was reading James Bond and John le Carre. That was part of what attracted me to crime - the idea of getting a wide audience.
I am the pianist of the duo, although Aleksey does pretty good... you know we've written more and more stuff where he has to play the piano. But you know, to be very honest, I actually went into music because I wanted to be a composer and a conductor. And piano was just one of the ways to get into that.
My father, Rodolfo, worked as a train conductor and that's how we came to live in the railway car. The Government owned it, and we paid rent on it. Back then I would wake up at 4 in the morning and run through the streets, selling newspapers. I'd scream out, 'Sol, Debate, Noreste.' Those were the papers I sold.
I didn't have traditional stage fright. If there was 500 people in the audience or three people in the audience, it didn't really make a difference. What made a difference was the conductor. Everything that I was scared about as a drummer was him. It was his face. It was whether or not he'd approve of my playing.
I am the conductor for life of the Staatskapelle in Berlin, which fills me with tremendous joy because I feel absolutely at one with them. When we play, I have a feeling that together we manage to create one collective lung for the whole orchestra so that everybody in the stage breathes the music in the same way.
There are two types of conductors. One is the good conductor who can do passionate music but also listen to the singers and do the orchestra. And then there are great conductors, who have their own opinion on the music, who are ruling everything - and not listening much to the singers, but the orchestra play amazingly.
I would often take this bus and go to a nearby village where I had hordes of animal friends. I was hardly around four or five years old then. The conductor was so used to seeing me hop on to the bus and get down at the same place, that he never asked any questions. The strangest part is, he never asked for a ticket either!
I worked for Union Pacific. I started out as a conductor at an intermodal switching facility outside of Salt Lake City. We'd pull in trains from all over the country, break them apart, consolidate the freight, and build other trains. It was great until I screwed up and took a management position. Then it became no fun very quickly.
Starting with a meagre amount of Rs 300 as a conductor, when I became an actor and started seeing huge moneys like Rs 3 or 4 lakhs, I thought I was 'an exclusive creation' by God, and he had made me like this. Later, I got the wisdom and realised that my time was good and things worked out! And I was also a normal human being like others.
I'm like a conductor. I come up with ideas, and I get all these people to make great music together. I have a team of really talented assistant designers. I have architects in my office. People I trained from the beginning in menswear, womenswear, and home. I have a great team who know what I want and feel and translate that into beautiful results.