oboeinsight

The quotes below are things I’ve found on the internet or in books. There is certainly a possibility for error here. If you see any misquotes or erroneous information don’t hesitate to email me at pattyoboe [at] mac [dot] com .

Oh … sometimes the connection to music isn’t direct. I’m sure you can still figure it out.
—
—

-A-

In life as in the dance: Grace glides on blistered feet.
-Alice Abram

There are high spots in all of our lives and most of them have come about through encouragement from someone else. I don’t care how great, how famous or successful a man or woman may be, each hungers for applause.
-George Matthew Adams

In our street, we have friends with lots in common. We discuss new books, films, popular culture, politics - everything except serious music. That shuts everyone up. I don’t think they even know what I do.
-John Adams

Music goes beyond words in its power to express human emotion. It is both the form and the content of human experience, being both exquisitely precise and richly ambiguous. For children, it constitutes the ultimate education and preparation for life.
-John Adams

The jury is out on this piece. I just don’t know about it. Of course, I’m the next to the most severe critic of my music, the most severe being my son. I like parts of it very, very much. Other things in it I’m unconvinced by. I shouldn’t be giving myself bad press, but I’m being very honest. …
-John Adams

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
-Scott Adams

Music, the greatest good that mortals know,
And all of heaven we have below.
-Joseph Addison

I can’t listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.
-Woody Allen (1935 - )

Opera is like a husband with a foreign title: expensive to support, hard to understand, and therefore a supreme social challenge.
-Cleveland Amory

I wish to share and pass down some of my generation’s traits, and encourage young people to create their own art, music, and literature.
-David Amram

Classical music is an interest of bloodsucking snobs.
-anaxagoras here

Where words fail, music speaks.
-Hans Christian Andersen

It might work with one orchestra, and the next orchestra — the oboe player might not get it. It’s different every time, but some of the orchestras do end up enjoying it and having a great time.
-Ian Anderson

I don’t mind what language an opera is sung in so long as it is the language I don’t understand.
-Sir Edward Appleton

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
-Aristotle

The flute is not an instrument with a good moral effect. It is too exciting.
-Aristotle

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
-Aristotle

Music exalts each joy, allays each grief, expels diseases, softens every pain, subdues the rage of poison, and the plague.
-John Armstrong, Scottish poet and physician, Art of Preserving Health (bk. IV, l. 512)

All music is folk music. I ain’t never heard no horse sing a song.”
-Louis Armstrong

If ya ain’t got it in ya, ya can’t blow it out.
-Louis Armstrong

If a piece of music is under three minutes long, it’s rock. Over three minutes, it’s classical.
-Robert Ashley (composer)

A long apprenticeship is the most logical way to success. The only alternative is overnight stardom, but I can’t give you a formula for that.
-Chet Atkins

Music is the best means we have of digesting time.
-W.H. Auden

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
-W. H. Auden

-B-

It’s easy to play any musical instrument: all you have to do is touch the right key at the right time and the instrument will play itself.
-Johann Sebastian Bach

The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.
-Johann Sebastian Bach

Love is like a violin. The music may stop now and then, but the strings remain forever.
-June Masters Bacher

Sometimes he commented on our tempos. We’d say that we were only following his own metronome marks, and his reply was, ‘My metronome at home is broken. Don’t pay any attention to my metronome marks.’
-Valentin Baerlinksy, cellist of the Borodin Quartet, talking about Shostakovich

Opera is for giving you goose bumps, for making the hair stand up on the back of your neck, for making you cry.
-Dr. Barbara Baker

In the arts, virtuosity still matters.
-Andrew Bales

I always maintain that playing in an orchestra intelligently is the best school for democracy. If you play a solo, the conductor and everybody in the orchestra follows you. Then, a few bars later, the main voice goes to another instrument, another group, and then you have to go back into the collective [sound]. The art of playing in an orchestra is being able to express yourself to the maximum but always in relation to something else that is going on.
-Daniel Barenboim

It may be that when the angels go about their task praising God, they play only Bach. I am sure, however, that when they are together en famille they play Mozart.
-Karl Barth (1886-1968) Protestant Theologian

People want to believe you’re happy with your performance; they’re living through you. Allow your listeners to enjoy the performance no matter how much you would like to tell them what’s going on inside your head.
Correcting a compliment is the same as revealing a magic trick; it makes people feel stupid for not seeing the truth.
-Mark Baxter (from here)

If a thing isn’t worth saying, you sing it.
- Pierre Beaumarchais, The Barber of Seville

Bohème is one of the most skillfully orchestrated scores we have. The use of the Glockenspiel or the chimes, not to mention the more conventional instruments, is precisely related to the happenings on stage. Even the big drum˘the bane of Italian opera˘is here used with restraint. It is rather an oddity that Puccini is not given due credit for being the master of orchestral writing that he is. The simple fact is that toward the end of the 19th century such men as Tchaikovsky and Strauss evolved a formula for orchestration which they used more or less unchanged under all circumstances: doublings in the strings with the horns in the middle, or certain other set relationships. A very good sound, to be sure, but tending to a certain sameness. With Puccini each score presents a different tonal quality and colouration˘Bohème is different from Butterfly, as Butterfly is different from Tosca. To be sure, there are family traits, but the texture and detail in each are very much related to the specific kind of subject with which he is dealing.
-Sir Thomas Beecham

Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.
-Sir Thomas Beecham

If an opera cannot be played by an organ grinder, it’s not going to achieve immortality.
-Sir Thomas Beecham

If she is attractive, I can’t perform with her; if she is not, then I won’t.
-Sir Thomas Beecham

In assigning Puccini his rightful place among great composers of opera, one cannot compare him directly with such earlier masters as Mozart, Rossini, Donizetti or the Verdi of Rigoletto, and Trovatore. The customs of writing were then very much different. They had a secco. In other words when the action bogged down or the librettist was in a quandary what to do next, he would simply stop, have the character speak some lines that developed the story˘which could be put to any conventional musical line˘and then the composer would write an aria. If the quality of the inspiration was great, as almost always with Mozart, or sometimes in Rossini, what happened in between was unimportant. But when the scheme of writing a consecutive musical texture was introduced, the problem became very much greater. It is for this reason that I rate Puccini so highly. He achieved a synthesis of word, music and action that is not only highly appropriate to the subject and easy to assimilate, but also, in the end, very satisfying.
-Sir Thomas Beecham

They are quite hopeless - drooling, driveling, doleful, depressing, dropsical drips.
-Sir Thomas Beecham on music critics Feb. 13, 1954

We started with the Beethoven, and I kept up with Cortot through the Grieg, Schumann, Bach and Tchaikovsky, and then he hit one I didn’t know, so I stopped dead.
-Sir Thomas Beecham, conductor, on a disasterous lapse of memory by Alfred Cortot during a piano concerto

And why didn’t they encore the Fugue? That alone should have been repeated! Cattle! Asses!
-Ludwig Van Beethoven (His comment when the audience didn’t call for encores after his fugue, while they did so for middle movements of his string quartet, Opus 130.)

Anyone who tells a lie has not a pure heart, and cannot make a good soup.
-Ludwig Van Beethoven

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.
-Ludwig Van Beethoven

I think that it will interest the musical public.
-Ludwig Van Beethoven, on his Third Symphony

Music - The one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.
-Ludwig Van Beethoven

Rossini would have been a great composer if his teacher had spanked him enough on his backside.
-Ludwig van Beethoven

There ought to be but one large art warehouse in the world, to which the artist could carry his art-works and from which he could carry away whatever he needed. As it is, one must be half a tradesman.
-Ludwig Van Beethoven

Every orchestra is different. Sometimes, you’re blown away by a particular musician. If I’m playing the Brahms concerto, it’s crucial to have a great oboe player, because we work in tandem.
-Joshua Bell

Music may achieve the highest of all missions: She may be a bond between nations, races and states, who are strangers to one another in many ways; She may unite what is disunited, and bring peace to what is hostile.
-Dr. Max Bendiner

Now, if you have read, say, Mr. Krehbiel’s “How to Listen to Music” (which can be got at any bookseller’s for less than the price of a stall at the Alhambra, and which contains photographs of all the orchestral instruments and plans of the arrangement of orchestras) you would next go to a promenade concert with an astonishing intensification of interest in it. Instead of a confused mass, the orchestra would appear to you as what it is–a marvellously balanced organism whose various groups of members each have a different and an indispensable function. You would spy out the instruments, and listen for their respective sounds. You would know the gulf that separates a French horn from an English horn, and you would perceive why a player of the hautboy gets higher wages than a fiddler, though the fiddle is the more difficult instrument. You would *live* at a promenade concert, whereas previously you had merely existed there in a state of beatific coma, like a baby gazing at a bright object.
-Arnold Bennett

The oboe solo at the beginning of the funeral march is like a face in the crowd. It’s a very personalized and very interior expression of grief within a public ceremony. It’s a modern solo in that it has tremendous psychological dimension to it. It’s very introspective and fraught with all kinds of anxiety and tension.
-William Bennett

Music is the air I breathe and the planet I inhabit. The only way I can pay my debt to music is by bringing it to others, with all my love.
-Cathy Berberian

At least I have the modesty to admit that lack of modesty is one of my failings.
-Hector Berlioz

One man only in this orchestra does not allow himself any such diversion. Wholly intent upon his task, all energy, indefatigable, his eye glued to his notes and his arm in perpetual motion, he would feel dishonored if he were to miss an eighth note or incur censure for his tone quality. By the end of each act he is flushed, perspiring, exhausted; he can hardly breathe, yet he does not dare take advantage of the respite offered by the cessation of musical hostilities to go for a glass of beer at the nearest bar. The fear of missing the first measures of the next act keeps him rooted at his post. Touched by so much zeal, the manager of the opera house once sent him six bottles of wine, “by way of encouragement.” But the artist, “conscious of his responsibilities,” was so far from grateful for the gift that he returned it with the proud words: “I have no need of encouragement.” The reader will have guessed that I am speaking of the man who plays the bass drum.
-Hector Berlioz

I’m not interested in having an orchestra sound like itself. I want it to sound like the composer.
-Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) American conductor and composer

Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time … the wait is simply too long.
-Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990)

The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another . . . and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.
-Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990)

Music is a higher revelation than philosophy.
-Ludwig Van Beethoven

It’s so medieval. You have these arcane machines … and you cut yourself a lot. But maybe only one out of two dozen will be right, just because that’s the way cane is.
-William Bennett (Talking about cutting oboe reeds)

We have forgotten, or refuse to accept, the fact that there are other schools of playing, other approaches to the oboe, other methods of making reeds, which deserve and have at least as wide an acceptance as our own … We are taught to laugh at the English vibrato, smirk at the German sound, ridicule the French brightness.
-Melvin Berman (Professor emeritus of oboe and chamber music at the University of Toronto; from the Journal of The International Double Reed Society, 1973)

There are two instruments worse than a clarinet - two clarinets.

-Ambrose Bierce

There are two sighs of relief every night in the life of an opera manager. The first comes when the curtain goes up The second sigh of relief comes when the final curtain goes down without any disaster, and one realizes, gratefully, that the miracle has happened again.
-Sir Rudolf Bing (1902-1997) general manager of the Metropolitan Opera 1950 to 1972

Ah, music! What a beautiful art! But what a wretched profession!
Georges Bizet (1867)

As a musician I tell you that if you were to suppress adultery, fanaticism, crime, evil, the supernatural, there would no longer be the means for writing one note.
-Georges Bizet, letter to Edmond Galabert, 1866

Let us have fantasy, boldness, unexpectedness, enchantment — above all, tenderness, morbidezza!
-Bizet, letter to Edmond Galabert, quoted in W Dean, Bizet (1975)

The oboe is a narrow channel through which one must push a flood of expression. It takes control and restraint. When I play, I feel all this emotion, expression, concentrated˘like a continual knife stabbing at your heart˘but never going into˘never damaging.
-Robert Bloom

To give an audience too much music is criminally mistaken kindness and real irreverence to the composer.
-Artur Bodanzky

Art knows no limit, and the artists will never achieve perfection.
-Bente Borsum

The audience is fifty percent of the performance.
-Shirley Booth

I know canned music makes chickens produce more eggs, and factory workers produce more; but how much more can they get out of you on an elevator?
-Victor Borge (1909-2000)

Always look out for the little notes˘like minorities.
-William Boughton

Don’t impose yourself until you really know the work throroughly.
-William Boughton

Re-creative artists are investigators.
-William Boughton

Well, see! Grieg new best. Strange, that.
-William Boughton

You can’t expect the audience to feel anything if you don’t.
-William Boughton

You just have to believe in a corporate pulse.
-William Boughton

You’re musicians, not bank clocks!
-William Boughton

I’ve been a woman for a little over 50 years and have gotten over my initial astonishment. As for conducting an orchestra, that’s a job where I don’t think sex plays much part.
-Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979)

Life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece.
-Nadia Boulanger

Originality is the art of concealing your source.
-Nadia Boulanger

You can be a successful oboe teacher in Dubuque, Iowa and have a good, successful, fulfilling life.
-Roger Bourland

I saw the Nutcracker to be a dummy as I thought of its mouth moving like a nutcracker - and also find them pretty scary as they almost have a life of their own.
-Matthew Bourne

I know you’ve heard it a thousand times before. But it’s true — hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don’t love something, then don’t do it.
-Ray Bradbury (1920 - ) US science-fiction writer

For the shallow delights of matrimony and opera I have no courage.
-Johannes Brahms

If there is anyone here whom I have not insulted, I beg his pardon.
-Johannes Brahms

It is not hard to compose, but it is wonderfully hard to let the superfluous notes fall under the table.
-Johannes Brahms

Glauben Sie ich will fur die Schreibtischelade schreiben?
-Johannes Brahms (Translation: Do you think I want to write for the desk drawer? This was Brahms’ response to oboist Richard Baumgärtel (1858-1941) when he asked why Brahms hadn’t written chamber music for oboe, when he had been doing so for clarinet.)

My things really are written with an appalling lack of practicality!
-Johannes Brahms

The slower pieces we choose for the purpose of getting guests quiet and thoughtful. We pick pieces in a major key, not a minor one, so it doesn’t sound like someone died.
-Kathy Brantigan (Executive Director of Denver Brass

I read lots of blog discussions bemoaning “the death of classical music”. Lots of them seem to think the solutions would involve loosening up concert dress and protocol or more “crossover” programming. None of this will ever counteract music programming that openly dismisses the value of the music itself.
-Bill Brice

Popular applause veers with the wind.
-John Bright (English writer, 1811-1889)

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness and of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony.
-Benjamin Britten

The old idea of a composer suddenly having a terrific idea and sitting up all night to write it is nonsense. Nighttime is for sleeping.
-Benjamin Britten

Listening to the breathtaking music Howard Shore created [for "Lord of the Rings"] is like seeing the movie time and time again. You just close your eyes, open your ears and the whole film unfolds before you. Howard’s work is incredibly visual, evocative and narrative.
-Paul Broucek, Executive Vice President of Music at New Line Cinema

I’ve outdone anyone you can name — Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500.
-James Brown (1928) America’s Godfather of Soul, charter member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

There are certain things in which mediocrity is intolerable: poetry, music, painting, public eloquence. What torture it is to hear a frigid speech being pompously declaimed, or second-rate verse spoken with all a bad poet’s bombast!
-Jean De La Bruyére (1645-1696) French writer, moralist
“Of Books,” aph. 7, Characters (1688)

He who hears music, feels his solitude peopled at once.
-Robert Browning

Unlike painters, who work with space, musicians work with time, with note following note as second follows second. Listen! says Vivaldi, Brahms, Stravinsky. Listen to this time that I have framed between the first note and the last and to these sounds in time. Listen to the way the silence is broken into uneven lengths between the sounds and to the silences themselves. Listen to the scrape of bow against gut, the rap of stick against drumhead, the rush of breath through reed and wood. The sounds of the earth are like music, the old song goes, and the sounds of music are also like the sounds of the earth, which is of course where music comes from. Listen to the voices outside the window, the rumble of the furnace, the creak of your chair, the water running in the kitchen sink. Learn to listen to the music of your own lengths of time, your own silences.
-Frederik Buechner (from the book Listening to Your Life)

He that is down needs fear no fall
He that is low, no pride.
- John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress (pt. II)

Treble double-reed instruments have for centuries been invested with the potential to captivate those who hear them and to still the savage spirit. Shawms were used by Muslims and Christians alike to muster forces for battle and to inflame their warriors with courage, and alongside their comrade-at-arms the trumpet, shawms and oboes have been the instruments of power, attendants to colonial conquest.
-The Oboe by Geoffrey Burgess and Bruce Haynes, p7

Applause is the spur of noble minds, the end and aim of weak ones.
-Edmund Burke (British statesman and philosopher, 1729-1797)

The more perfect music we have, the more attractive the peculiarities and anomalies of human performance become. Perfection is a second rate idea.
-T Bone Burnett

We live in an age of music for people who don’t like music. The record industry discovered some time ago that there aren’t that many people who actually like music. For a lot of people, music’s annoying, or at the very least they don’t need it. They discovered if they could sell music to a lot of those people, they could sell a lot more records.
-T Bone Burnett

Critics! Those cutthroat bandits in the paths of fame.
-Robert Burns

Every man’s work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.
-Samuel Butler (1612-80), English poet, author

The exercise of singing is delightful to nature, and good to preserve the health of man, It doth strengthen all parts of the breast, and doth open the pipes.
-William Byrd

Some say, compar’d to Bononcini,
That Mynheer Handel’s but a ninny;
Others aver that he to Handel
Is scarcely fit to hold a candle.
Strange all this difference should be
‘Twixt Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
-John Byrom (1691-1763) English author, poet, On the feuds between Handel and Bononcini

A man must serve his time to every trade save censure — critics all are ready made.
-Lord Byron

-C-

I have nothing to say
and I am saying it
and that is poetry
as I needed it
-John Cage

It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of “culture.”
-John Cage

If you can sell green toothpaste in this country, you can sell opera.
-Sarah Caldwell (opera conductor, producer, director)

Film is one of the three universal languages, the other two: mathematics and music.
-Frank Capra (1897-1991) Italian born American Film Director

Who is there that, in logical words, can express the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the Infinite, and lets us for moments gaze into that!
-Thomas Carlyle, on Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841)

You know the problem: we need a man for solo trombone.
- Sergiu Celibidachei (to a woman trombonist)

Classical music is not stuffy, it just needs a different setting.
-Jean Jacques Cesbron

I never wanted to be famous. I only wanted to be great.
I did it to myself. It wasn’t society… it wasn’t a pusher, it wasn’t being blind or being black or being poor. It was all my doing.
(My note: In 1965, Charles was arrested for possession of heroin. I’m assuming that’s what this quote is about.)
-Ray Charles (1930-2004)

Affluence separates people. Poverty knits ‘em together. You got some sugar and I don’t; I borrow some of yours. Next month you might not have any flour; well, I’ll give you some of mine.
-Ray Charles (1930-2004)

I was born with music inside me. Music was one of my parts. Like my ribs, my kidneys, my liver, my heart. Like my blood. It was a force already within me when I arrived on the scene. It was a necessity for me-like food or water.

-Ray Charles (1930-2004)

Love is a special word, and I use it only when I mean it. You say the word too much and it becomes cheap.

-Ray Charles (1930-2004)

My music had roots which I’d dug up from my own childhood, musical roots buried in the darkest soil.
Ray Charles (1930-2004)

An intellectual is someone who can listen to the “William Tell Overture” without thinking of the Lone Ranger.
-John Chesson

[T]here’s no bad day that can’t be overcome by listening to a barbershop quartet; this is just truth, plain and simple.
Chuck, The World According to Chuck weblog, September 30, 2003

To serve is a performer’s inheritance, plus our obligation.
-Van Cliburn

The moment I realized I didn’t have to major in music in order to play, it was like a blinding light shining down.
-Eve Cohen

Personally, I think the audience should applaud for the oboist who gives the ‘A’ rather than the concertmaster, who only walks out without falling off the stage!
-Fredric Cohen

An artist, in giving a concert, should not demand an entrance fee but should ask the public to pay, just before leaving as much as they like. From the sum he would be able to judge what the world thinks of him - and we would have fewer mediocre concerts.
-Kit Coleman

Music is the art of thinking with sounds.
-Jules Combarieu

Music has charms to soothe a savage breast,
To soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.
I’ve read that things inanimate have moved,
And, as with living souls, have been inform’d,
By magic numbers and persuasive sound.
-William Congreve, The Mourning Bride (act I, sc. 1)

The Americans . . . are almost ignorant of the art of music, one of the most elevating, innocent and refining of human tastes, whose influence on the habits and morals of a people is of the most beneficial tendency.
-James Fenimore Cooper

Most people use music as a couch; they want to be pillowed on it, relaxed and consoled for the stress of daily living. But serious music was never meant to be soporific.
-Aaron Copland

Mozart in his music was probably the most reasonable of the world’s great composers. It is the happy balance between flight and control, between sensibility and self-discipline, simplicity and sophistication of style that is his particular province… Mozart tapped once again the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breath-taking rightness that has never since been duplicated.
-Aaron Copland, Copland on Music (1960)

When I speak of the gifted listener, I am thinking of the nonmusician primarily, of the listener who intends to retain his amateur status. It is the thought of just such a listener that excites the composer in me.
-Aaron Copland

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, ‘Is there a meaning to music?’ My answer would be, ‘Yes.’ And ‘Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?’ My answer to that would be, ‘No.’
- Aaron Copland (1900 - 1990)

Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.
-Bill Cosby

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture - it’s really a stupid thing to want to do.
-Elvis Costello

O, popular applause! what heart of man is proof against thy sweet, seducing charms?
-William Cowper (English poet One of the most widely read English poets of his day, 1731-1800)

-D-

He said he would like to try out the English horn, which resembles a clarinet, while the French horn is a twined version of a trumpet and a saxophone.
-from the Daily Herald Tribune (no author given)

Realize that if you have time to whine and complain about something then you have the time to do something about it.
Anthony J. D’Angelo

Clutching a plastic doll of the golden droid he made famous, Daniels admitted to being “put off by opera houses, concert halls, by a certain snobbishness.”
“There is none of that in this concert,” said the British actor during a chat with reporters just prior to rehearsing the program. “People already belong to the music and the music already belongs to them.”
-Anthony Daniels (C3PO in Star Wars)

Oboe is turning out to be a piece of cake.
-Eric Dannewitz

Mrs. Gilmartin smiled, and suddenly I saw what may have drawn her and her husband together; they had been united by music, that siren who makes so many bad matches.
-Robertson Davies, The Cunning Man

No, it’s the musicians and I must say they are an accomplished bunch, but odd, as musicians tend to be. Is it the vibration from their instruments, do you suppose, working on the brain? All that fraught buzzing?
-Robertson Davies, The Cunning Man

To this day I am indulgent toward orchestras that are trying to lift themselves in the world, while critics are busy assuring them that they are not the Vienna Philharmonic and never will be.
-Robertson Davies, The Cunning Man

We both work hard like stink from Friday through Sat., preparing the goodies, which I must say are pretty lavish˘scones with jam and whipped cream are a popular item and cucumber sandwiches by the hod. Because they eat like refugees, being musicians mostly ….
We seem to specialize in musicians because they are really the most clubbable of the artistic community here ….
Why musicians? It just happens but I suppose there is some deep reason for it. The painters are a very special lot and feel themselves beleaguered because they are trying to drag Toronto taste into the twentieth century and it’s an uphill pull. Sculptors hardly to be found; no call for it except effigies of dead politicians and they are getting very expensive (bronze, of course) and are generally farmed out to somebody in Montreal who specializes in that sort of thing and does it from photographs. Writers˘well, we’ve tried with writers but no go; they are so quarrelsome, and they expect booze, which we can’t run to. Certainly not the way writers guzzle it. So it’s musicians, chiefly.
-Robertson Davies, The Cunning Man

Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.
-Miles Davis

Art is the most beautiful deception of all. And although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we must hope that it will remain a deception lest it become a utilitarian thing, sad as a factory.
-Claude Debussy

How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching the naked flesh of feeling.
-Claude Debussy

The century of airplanes has a right to its own music.
-Claude Debussy

The sound of the sea, the curve of a horizon, wind and leaves, the cry of a bird, they all leave manifold impressions in us. And suddenly, without wishing it at all, one of these memories spring from us and find expression in musical language. I want to sing my interior landscape with the simple artlessness of a child.
-Claude Debussy

Perfectly and painfully encapsulating in reality this conundrum, today I am punished for yesterday’s pleasure with a significant amount of sunburn, which could have been avoided so easily. I have tried to atone by spending spectacular amounts of money on aloe lotions. It is clear to one and all from my vivid face that I am a beach novice who fell into the stupidest of traps, and so this morning I put on my Johann Sebastian Bach T-shirt as a way of explaining. “You see, everybody, I’m really a classical musician and I think about Bach a lot and that’s why I forgot to put on sunscreen.” Perhaps though people won’t read so deeply into the shirt as I imagine, and they will just see a sunburned fool.
-Jeremy Denk

Criticism is easy, and art is difficult.
[Fr.,La critique est aisee, et l'art est difficile.]
-Phillipe V. Destouches, Glorieux (II, 5)

Too many people today are trying to justify the precision with which organized musical sound is produced rather than the energy with which it is manipulated.
-David Diamond (1939)

“We all have these dual personalities. We have our talent and then we have our self-doubt. We’re all questioning what we can do. Finally my real talent itself was able to show.
-Pedro Diaz (English horn, Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, 2005 interview on Weekend America)

Music provides the avenue for people to meditate upon the great events of the salvation, which, for Christians, is the life of Jesus, his death and resurrection.
-Anthony DiCello

If I didn’t have to dance, maybe I could play well. If I didn’t have to play, maybe I could dance well. I’m stuck between the two.
-Diana Doherty, oboe soloist in the U.S. premiere of Ross Edwards’s Oboe Concert

Probably after that moment, he’s unhappy for the rest of his life.
-Placido Domingo (commenting on Pinkerton, after Butterfly’s suicide)

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.
-Arthur Conan Doyle

If you give a bad critic enough rope, sooner or later they’ll use it. It’s just a shame when they have to hang a good pianist/violinist/writer first.
-Jessica Duchen

Mozart is sunshine.
-Antonin Dvorak, quoted in Otakar Sourek (ed.), Antonin Dvorak: Letters and Reminiscences (1954)

Use what talent you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best.
-Henry Van Dyke (1852-1933) American scholar, educator, lyricist

An artist has got to be careful never really to arrive at a place where he thinks he’s at somewhere. You always have to realize you’re constantly in a state of becoming. As long as you can stay in that realm, you’ll sort of be alright.
-Bob Dylan

What good are fans? You can’t eat applause for breakfast. You can’t sleep with it.
-Bob Dylan

-E-

It’s very difficult to play. But an instrument should be difficult to play. That’s the only way to master musical materials, by overcoming these difficulties.
-John Eaton (referring to a new Moog creation)

All good art is about something deeper than it admits.
-Roger Ebert

Listening is an ability that gets developed by doing it. You have to both listen to the same thing often enough to get beneath the surface and to constantly listen to new things. And by new things, I mean things you’ve never heard before, things you don’t like on first hearing, even things you hate. The constant consumption of the same old, same old kills off the ability. If you want to see where the exclusive snobs are, it’s in the people who will brush off the work of great pioneers like Coleman, or Betty Carter or Arnold Schoenberg or Milton Babbitt as they go back to not listen to the same, sappy three minute tune for the thousandth time. To deride music as carefully and daringly produced as theirs because it failed to entertain on the first hearing, to think that such a superficial brush off was worth the breath wasted to express it, now that’s snobbery.
-Echidne of the Snakes

It’s not so bad being cursed if you have your own theme song.
-Peter Economos (commenting on the Dutchman being cursed)

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
-Thomas Edison

The best, most beautiful, and most perfect way that we have of expressing a sweet concord of mind to each other is by music.
-Jonathan Edwards

The reeds can’t hold their tune very well.
-Stephanie Edwards (whoever she is) in response to a question from Bob Eubanks. He asked if certain instruments were more difficult to play in the rain. (It’s raining like crazy for the Rose Parade in Pasadena.)

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice.
-Albert Einstein

It occurred to me by intuition, and music was the driving force behind that intuition. My discovery was the result of musical perception.
-Albert Einstein (when asked about his theory of relativity)

If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.
-Albert Einstein

Mozart is the greatest composer of all. Beethoven ‘created’ his music, but the music of Mozart is of such purity and beauty that one feels he merely ‘found’ it˘that it has always existed as part of the inner beauty of the universe waiting to be revealed.
-Albert Einstein

An Englishman will take you into a large room, beautifully proportioned, and will point out to you that it is white- all over white- and somebody will say what exquisite taste. You know in your own mind, in your own soul, that it is not taste at all˘that is the want of taste˘that is mere evasion. English music is white and evades everything.
-Sir Edward Elgar

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.
-George Eliot (1819 -1880)

… music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all, but you are the music while the music lasts.
-T.S. Eliot, from THE DRY SALVAGES, (No. 3 of ‘Four Quartets’)

Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous you don’t want it.
-Duke Ellington

Critics have their purposes, and they’re supposed to do what they do, but sometimes they get a little carried away with what they think someone should have done, rather than concerning themselves with what they did.
-Duke Ellington

The most important thing I look for in a musician is whether he knows how to listen.
-Duke Ellington

There is hardly any money interest in art, and music will be there when money is gone.
-Duke Ellington

The wise musicians are those who play what they can master.
-Duke Ellington

Art is a jealous mistress, and, if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad husband, and an ill provider, and should be wise in season, and not fetter himself with duties which will embitter his day.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every artist was first an amateur.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is hard to go beyond your public. If they are satisfied with cheap performance, you will not easily arrive at better. If they know what is good, and require it, you will aspire and burn until you achieve it. But from time to time, in history, men are born a whole age too soon.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Music takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence, and whereto.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sugar is not so sweet to the palate as sound to the healthy ear.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Unless you try to do something beyond what you have already mastered, you will never grow.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you that you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

You are never as bad as you think you are. On the other hand, you are never as good as you think you are.
-Harold Emert (I’ve been informed that at least one other has said this as well.)

Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don’t feel like doing them.
-Julius Erving

When you play music you discover a part of yourself that you never knew existed.
-Bill Evans

Why don’t you sell your magic cards and make a living off that, it’s more than you’ll ever make playing the oboe. I think the oboe hit its apex with Peter and the Wolf man. I mean, what were his parents thinking, “Oh yeah, the oboe, that’s a great investment in our son’s future.” Seriously, has he looked in the mirror at himself while playing the oboe? Does he actually think, “Yeah! people are just gonna bow down at my feet when I play this thing!”
-Ezra, venting after this guy took his favourite practice room for the second time at school.

-F-

You listen dutifully to the oboe, look at your slides, pull the main slide a bit and then put it back where it has been for the last seven years!
Phil Farkas (horn player)

A teacher who is only interested in great talents is like a man who only seeks the company of rich people.
-Carl Flesch

The basic sound of my instrument, my voice, was that of a gentle oboe. it
had to be gradually amplified. I had to find more resonance to make it broader.
And this can of course, only be the result of long, painstaking work because
the instrument of the voice is invisible. One has to discover the correct
feelings to solve the technical problems and assimilate the process.

-Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

When you go out onto the stage, all the preparation has to be forced into your subconscious. For the moment of the performance, we all have to return to a new level of unconsciousness. All the reflection and all the doubts have to be laid aside before you start.
-Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

I stole everything that I heard, but mostly I stole from the horns.
-Ella Fitzgerald

There are three things in the world I love most: the sea, Hamlet, and Don Giovanni.
-Gustave Flaubert

Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.
-Anatole France

Hide not your talents, they for use were made. What’s a sundial in the shade?
-Benjamin Franklin

Hell is a half-filled auditorium.
-Robert Frost

-G-

Undoubtedly, part of the reason students did not rush to the event is that most are simply not interested in classical music. If this applies to you, I am going to make an effort at conversion. In an age when the greatest sin is to make a judgment on someone’s personal preferences, I am going to make a big one: Classical music is simply better than contemporary popular or rock music. The great composers of the Western musical tradition were able to perform incomparable musical feats, and, at the peaks of technique and sophistication, their music simply cannot be compared to anything modern in terms of melody, harmony, complexity and spiritual or emotional expressiveness. Bach, even when using no libretto, was able to invoke the divine in ways that no one even aspires to today.
-Goutham Ganesan

Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.
-Jean Genet

I personally like Tchaikovsky because he’s so dangerous.
-Valery Gergiev

True music must repeat the thought and inspirations of the people and the time. My people are Americans and my time is today.
-George Gershwin

A song without music is a lot like H2 without the O.
-Ira Gershwin

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.
-Henry Giles (clergyman and lecturer)

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.
-Andre Gide

Something’s your vocation if it keeps making more of you.
-Gail Godwin, Evensong p 12

A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words.
-Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749 - 1832) German poet, dramatist
Wilhelm Meister Apprenticeship, bk. 5, ch. 1 (1795-1796)

Please write music like Wagner, only louder.
-Sam Goldwyn, instructing composer for a movie

I know that I am honest. That my music has emotional power, but I know my limitations, too. I know that there is something healthy in my music regarding the current world of classical music, but I know there will be something amazing coming after. I feel like a temporary kind of voice and somebody better will carry on.
-Osvaldo Golijov

Beethoven and Liszt have contributed to the advent of long hair.
-Louis Moreau Gottschalk

I’ve bested you. Faust has made 20,000 francs this week and your Le Cid only 16,000 . . . suicide’s the only thing left for you now.
-Charles Gounod (1818-1893) French composer to French composer Jules Massenet (Harding, Gounod, 1973)

I fight against the void. I think I’ve written something acceptable, and then, when I look at it again, I find it execrable.
-Charles Gounod

Musical ideas sprang to my mind like a flight of butterflies, and all I had to do was to stretch out my hand to catch them.
-Charles Gounod

Take the Spanish airs and mine out of the score, and there remains nothing to Bizet’s credit but the sauce that masks the fish.
-Charles Gounod (1818-93) on the premiere of Carmen, 1875, quoted in W Dean, Bizet (1975)

If none of these [plagiarized recordings] turn out to be something that I did, I’ll be deeply insulted!
-Gary Graffman

Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.
-Martha Graham (1894-1991) American dancer, choreographer, teacher quoted in ib, 5 Aug 86

Music is a friend of labor for it lightens the task by refreshing the nerves and spirit of the worker.
-William Green

Artists like Bach and Beethoven erected churches and temples on the heights. I only wanted… to build dwellings for men in which they might feel happy and at home.
-Edvard Grieg

I am sure my music has a taste of codfish in it.
-Edvard Grieg

Must Never Be Performed
-Edvard Grieg, written on a symphony he wrote

…performing musicians don’t get to enjoy the experience the way audiences do. For example: if we wallow in the sadness of a sad piece, or the exultation of an exultant piece, it’s liable to distract us from the things we have to concentrate on in order to communicate that sadness or exultation to the listener.
-Matthew Guerrieri

-H-

The fact is, an effective performance is more likely to emanate from humility than from arrogance.
-Jerry Hadley

I think that if people show up in jeans and chains, it’s great that all parts of culture are interested in music. People forget sometimes that it’s about the music, not how you act and dress.
-Hilary Hahn

It’s fine with me if people want to applaud between movements of a concerto. It doesn’t bother me — it’s part of performance experience. Sometimes when they applaud if I’m still playing it’s not as good, but there’s always a way around it. Actually the applause gives me a little rest and chance to stretch, too.
-Hilary Hahn

When they have to play long sections without taking a breath, their skin turns from red to purple, their veins and eyes start to pop out, and their facial muscles look very strained. I think I’d pass out if I had to perform such a feat.
-Hilary Hahn, recommending that audience members watch the oboists and clarinetists when at an orchestra concert.

I have every iPod that’s been made ˘ that’s how sick I am. I carry anything and everything I possibly would want to listen to. I have a lot of jazz. I adore Ralph Towner, Leo Kottke. I’ve always been a big Oscar Peterson fan. I’ve branched out a little bit more in rock-and-roll, but that’s maybe because I’m 50 years old and I can now listen to Steely Dan again without shame. I adore the Grateful Dead. Creedence Clearwater Revival. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. All that’s been fun to get back into. But I’m no longer interested in the Doobie Brothers.
-Thomas Hampson

Whether I was in my body or out of my body as I wrote it I know not. God knows.
-George Frideric Handel (it is reported that he said this regarding his composition, Messiah)

Music is an elegant art and fine amusement but as an occupation it hath little dignity, having for its object nothing better than mere entertainment and pleasure.
-Handel’s Father

The Prelude to [Wagner's] ‘Tristan und Isolde’ reminds one of the old Italian painting of a martyr whose intestines are slowly unwound from his body on a reel.
-Eduard Hanslick

I’m a great believer in conversational rhythm. I think in terms of rhythmic dialogue. It’s so easy, you can talk naturally. It’s like peas rolling off a knife. Take the great screen actors and actresses, Bette Davis, Eddie Robinson, Jimmy Cagney, Spencer Tracy. They all talk in rhythm. And rhythm and movement are the life of the screen.
-Lorenz Hart (lyricist, referring to the movie Love Me Tonight)

If they think they are doing something new they ought to do what I do every day. I spend at least two hours every day listening to Johann Sebastian Bach, and man, it’s all there. If they want to improvise around a theme, which is the essence of jazz, they should learn from the master. He never wastes a note, and he knows where every note is going and when to bring it back. Some of these cats go way out and forget where they began or what they started to do. Bach will clear it up for them.
-Coleman Hawkins (1904-1969) American jazz saxophonist

What is the voice of song, when the world lacks the ear of taste?
-Nathaniel Hawthorne

When words leave off, music begins.
-Heinrich Heine

He held my hand, with sincerity, and escorted me directly into the musical and poetic world. I felt the snowflakes, the icy chill, and the heaviness of a broken heart. I dreamed nostalgically when we stopped at the linden tree, and though I wanted to run away from the hurdy-gurdy man, I followed his mesmerizing tune towards the inevitable.
-Heather Heise from In the Wings found here

Veering toward a visual expression of my creativity has allowed a new
freedom to soar in my music-making. I like to let certain subjects in my paintings
shimmer, as certain notes in a melody vibrate, lighting up canvas or phrase
from within.
-Marsha Heller (1939) American oboist and painter (student of Harold Gomberg)

Then, there’s the reason why woodwinds are tucked behind the strings in orchestras: Seeing the players having clear their instruments of accumulated saliva a dozen times per concert has its visual/aesthetic drawbacks.
-Paul Hertelendy (from a review)

Classical composers are a mild and bookish lot on the whole. They like to wrap up warm, are into organic food, and rarely break into a run. Their music reflects the fact that they live in their heads, rather than their bodies.
-Ivan Hewett (a href=”http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/02/01/bmtansy101.xml”>here)

The example of Stravinsky and Messiaen (to name only two) shows that modern church music doesn’t have to be a pale copy of the past. And there are plenty of church musicians around who are bothered by the divorce between the Church and the wider world of music.
-Ivan Hewett

Music is actually too difficult for musicians. It should be left to the music critics, for whom no problem is too difficult.
-Stevens Hewitt

The instrument is physically difficult. Do not be seduced into practising as one would practise weight lifting. The order of work involved is that necessary to memorize a poem or speech.
-Stevens Hewitt

The primary difficulty in playing the oboe is knowing exactly when.
-Stevens Hewitt

There is no other art form that is so highly evolved, sophisticated, sublime, where absolute discipline of technique is allied with grace, beauty, sensuality and pure emotion.
-Charlotte Higgins (found here

But anyway it does seem that to 95-99% of people minor is sad. But to a few of us it’s just too beautiful to be sad.
-Hilda (of The Dominican Oboist)

People who make music together cannot be enemies, at least while the music lasts.
-Paul Hindemith

I understand the inventor of the bagpipes was inspired when he saw a man carrying an indignant, asthmatic pig under his arm. Unfortunately, the manmade sound never equalled the purity of the sound achieved by the pig.
-Alfred Hitchcock

It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites — opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity — where energies flow smoothly in one direction — there will be much doing but no music.
-Eric Hoffer

It was never my goal to achieve fame for fame itself. There’s tremendous fulfillment and pleasure by knowing and feeling that at least from time to time I give others pleasure. It’s not a one-way street, and it’s not at all a selfish act, playing music. At its best it’s a selfless act. And when those moments occur, it’s an indescribable feeling.
-Gary Hoffman

It is an unfortunate irony that music-making intended in part to attract new listeners is usually the least well rehearsed and motivated.
-Bernard Holland

A few can touch the magic string,
And noisy Fame is proud to win them;
Alas for those that never sing,
But die with all their music in them!
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water-bath is to the body.
-Oliver Wendell Holmes

I observe that there is a good deal of German music on the program, which is rather more to my taste than Italian or French. It is introspective and I want to introspect.
-Sherlock Holmes (from The Red Headed League)

Music-making as a means of getting money is hell.
-Gustav Holst

I dream of a collaboration that will become so complete that, often, the poet will think as musician and the musician as poet, so that the work resulting from this union will not be the random conclusion of a series of approximations and concessions, but the harmonious synthesis of two aspects of the same thought.
-Arthur Honneger (1892-1955)

The Nutcracker is a patriarchal ballet. The only good thing in the Nutcracker is the rats and they die!
-Penelope Hope (a character in a movie called “Bring It On Again” … and no, I’ve never seen the movie. But the quote is fun.)

This is a fault common to all singers, that among their friends they will never sing when they are asked; unasked, they will never desist.
-Horace

Although I have decided to at least temporarily continue to make my music available, I am entirely finished with the music establishment. No mainstream American music institution will be permitted to perform my work (Not that there’s much chance of it anyway). Why? Because it’s a rigged game and because it’s run by the elite; the same people who profit from dead Iraqi women and children. Some of the same people who stage terror attacks. Am I saying that, for instance, Esa-Pekka Solonen is a terrorist? No, but I am saying he works for terrorists, among others. I don’t want that job. I’ll be having more to say about these issues later on my blog. If you’re so inclined, please help support this site with a paypal contribution.
-William Houston

When people hear good music, it makes them homesick for something they never had and never will have.
-Edgar Watson Howe

The things which can make life enjoyable remain the same. They are, now as before, reading, music, fine arts, travel, the enjoyment of nature, sports, fashion, social vanity (knightly orders, honorary offices, gatherings) and the intoxication of the senses.
-Johan Huizinga (1872-1945) Dutch historian, “The Autumn of the Middle Ages,” ch. 2 (1921, trans. 1995)

I do wonder what would happen if the respective economics of orchestras and baseball switched places. In such a world Patricia Mitchell would be an all-star oboe player making ten million dollars a year with her very own bobble-head doll and trading cards. And the Yankees would be struggling to pay for their own road trips while they attempt to market games to a younger audience without alienating the blue-haired old ladies who faithfully subscribe every season (even though several quit coming after they introduced that “modern” designated hitter rule).
-From the Hurd Audio Blog

-I-

Please don’t try to make things nice! All the wrong notes are RIGHT. Just copy as I have — I want it that way.
-Charles Ives

-J-

No matter how many great performances or exciting visuals we put together for the movie, we found that it was all somewhat two dimensional until we added the emotional heart of Howard Shore’s music. Then, and only then, did the film come to life.
-Peter Jackson, director of The Lord Of The Rings

The wrong note note played with the right intention is much to be preferred to the right note played with no soul.
-Janine Jansen

I am still very proud of that concert. In America, the (musicians’) connection with the conductor is as with management — it becomes political. You cannot conduct properly in this environment. I hate this enemy situation between management and orchestra members.
-Neeme Järvi

What is a career, actually? Nobody can destroy my career. Only I can destroy my career, if I am a bad conductor. I’ve gone to lesser known orchestras in Scotland and Sweden, Detroit, but I have enjoyed the places I’ve been, and had success. I like the close community relations, and to solve problems.
-Neeme Järvi

Do not neglect your music. It will be a companion which will sweeten many hours of life to you.
-Thomas Jefferson to daughter Martha, 4 April 1790

If there is a gratification which I envy any people in this world, it is to your country its music. This is the favorite passion of my soul, & fortune has cast my lot in a country where it is in a state of deplorable barbarism. From the line of life in which we conjecture you to be, I have for some time lost the hope of seeing you here. Should the event prove so, I shall ask your assistance in procuring a substitute, who may be a proficient in singing, & on the Harpsichord. I should be contented to receive such an one two or three years hence, when it is hoped he may come more safely and find here a greater plenty of those useful things which commerce alone can furnish. The bounds of an American fortune will not admit the indulgence of a domestic band of musicians, yet I have thought that a passion for music might be reconciled with that economy which we are obliged to observe. I retain for instance among my domestic servants a gardener (Ortolans), a weaver (Tessitore di lino e lin), a cabinet maker (Stipeltaio) and a stone cutter (Scalpellino laborante in piano) to which I would add a vigneron. In a country where like yours music is cultivated and practised by every class of men I suppose there might be found persons of those trades who could perform on the French horn, clarinet or hautboy & bassoon, so that one might have a band of two French horns, two clarinets, & hautboys & a bassoon, without enlarging their domestic expenses. A certainty of employment for a half dozen years, and at the end of that time to find them if they choose a conveyance to their own country might induce them to come here on reasonable wages. Without meaning to give you trouble, perhaps it might be practicable for you in [your] ordinary intercourse with your people, to find out such men disposed to come to America. Sobriety and good nature would be desirable parts of their characters. If you think such a plan practicable, and will be so kind as to inform me what will be necessary to be done on my part I will take care that it shall be done. The necessary expenses, when informed of them, I can remit before they are wanting, to any port in France, with which country alone we have safe correspondence. I am Sir with much esteem your humble servant.
-Thomas Jefferson (in a letter to o Giovanni Fabbroni [Italy] Williamsburg in Virginia, June 8, 1778

Of all musicians, flutists are obviously the ones who know something we don’t.
-Paul Jennings

A typical day in the life of a heavy metal musician consists of a round of golf and an AA meeting.
-Billy Joel (1949) American singer, songwriter

Music is the only sensual pleasure without vice.
-Samuel Johnson

Of all noises, I think music is the least disagreeable.
-Samuel Johnson

Tenors get women by the score.
-James Joyce, Ulysses

-K-

Yes, playing in churches can probably be done. Playing in young, hip places, yes. But the bottom line is, there’s no way to deny we are a classical orchestra.,br>
-Carlos Kalmar

Although I was a Julliard student, the most creative thing I could possibly do was to start a rock ‘n’ roll band. I brought the oboe into the band not having any idea that the oboe was not a rock ‘n’ roll instrument. It seemed expressive enough to me.
-Michael Kamen

Of course, being a musician, I myself am rarely at work (or even awake) before noon, . . .
-Stefan Katz

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his/her vision wherever it takes him/her.
-John F. Kennedy

The life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is close to the center of a nation’s purpose - and is a test of the quality of a nation’s civilization.
-John F. Kennedy

If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.

I played cards with [Richard] Strauss every day for ten years, and he was a pig!
-Hans Knappertsbusch, conductor (1888-1965)

I would advise my young colleagues, the composers of symphonies, to drop in sometimes at the kindergarten, too. It is there that it is decided whether there will be anybody to understand their works in twenty years’ time.
-Zoltan Kodaly

Our age of mechanisation leads along a road ending with man himself as a machine; only the spirit of singing can save us from this fate.
-Zoltán Kodály

Orchestras seem content to be museums now, even as they wring their hands about dropping subscription sales and graying listeners.
-Allan Kozinn (in a New York Times article on 8/15/05)

It’s better to be booed than to be forgotten.
Mike Krukow

-L-

Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) is now fourteen, and, while he gives little sign of doing what Lord Rochester planned to do at the same age, there are nonetheless changes afoot. Harry’s voice, like that of his best friend, Ron (Rupert Grint), sounds like the mating cry of an oboe, and, worse still, the two cease to be best friends.
-Anthony Lane, From the opening of his review of Harry Potter in the latest New Yorker

The study of the oboe is full of traps for the student, and he must deploy great perseverance in order to arrive at a clean execution and attain a certain facility. As much as the tone of the oboe can be soft and velvety (albeit a littel nasal) when in the hands of a skilled virtuoso, it can be sour and screeching when the player is inexperienced or lacks the taste of a true artist.
-Pierre Larousse (Grand Dictionnaire universel - 1800s?)

I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.
-Bruce Lee (1940-1973) American actor and martial arts expert

When you love something it’s not a job anymore.
-Spike Lee (Commencement Speech, 2006)

So, here’s what we all already know that refreshed me today: music is a gift, and no matter how “good” you are, you can use your playing to deal with life in a way you cannot do with anything else.
-Maryn Leister (Of flarp. Precise link here.)

Because I am a storyteller I live by words. Perhaps music is a purer art form. It may be that when we communicate with life on another planet, it will be through music, not through language or words.
-Madeleine L’Engle (US novelist)

You can’t possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven’s Seventh and go slow.
- Oscar Levant, explaining his way out of a speeding ticket.

The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the listener anticipates on the basis of a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining…. If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void…. When the composer withholds less, the opposite occurs: he forces us to perform gymnastic exercises more skillful than our own.
-Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908) French anthropologist, “Overture”, The Raw and the Cooked (1964)

I like to listen to singers where I feel the direct openness of the heart in the voice. They say the eyes are the windows of the soul. You could say that the voice is the music of the soul.
-Lorraine Hunt Lieberson

First of all I listen to music. I like music.
-Gyorgy Ligeti (May 28, 1923 - June 12, 2006)

The fact that someone doesn’t appreciate classical music doesn’t make them stupid or inartistic or unappreciative of music in general. It simply means they’re not interested in it. And while I happen to find this sad (because I do find beauty in these styles) I don’t think it’s a national crisis. Excellent musicianship, composition, and/or the ability to move people with aural combinations of sound are not the exclusive domain of classical music no matter how much some people would have you think so.
-Lindsey of Behind Blue Eyes

Some critics are like chimneysweepers; they put out the fire below, and frighten the swallows from the nests above; they scrape a long time in the chimney, cover themselves with soot, and bring nothing away but a bag of cinders, and then sing out from the top of the house, as if they had built it.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807?1882) American poet, “Table Talk” (1845)

Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labour and to wait.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, A Psalm of Life (st. 9)

The Arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the Stock Market or the debates in Congress.
-Hendrik Willem Van Loon (1882-1944) Dutch-born American historian, writer

Music is a fair and glorious gift from God. I am strongly persuaded that after theology there is no art than can be placed on a level with music; for besides theology, music is the only art capable of affording peace and joy of the heart.
-Martin Luther

I love traditional instruments, though of course they are anachronisms. Satellites run around our planet, but we still play bassoons. It’s ridiculous!
-Wiltold Lutoslawski

People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet.
-Witold Lutoslawski (1913-1994)

-M-

I have this theory that I share with (Art Institute of Chicago president) Jim Cuno. It’s that nothing great was ever produced in isolation.
The guitar and the sitar are obviously related - even linguistically. The oud moves west from Persia to become the lute; it moves east to become the pipa. And a European hears an erhu and says it’s purely Chinese, a Chinese violin, but in Chinese the word ‘erhu’ means ‘two-stringed foreign instrument.’
-Yo-Yo Ma

I play an instrument that has four strings, and I’m still trying to get it right. What I’ve tried to do in the process of playing these four strings is to try and understand the people I meet, the stories they have to tell. And then become an advocate for them and their stories through music.
-Yo-Yo Ma

As you get older, the assumption is you get wiser. I try to earn it by not staying still, not resting on laurels. A lot of people in other professions are retired at my age. I care about music more than ever.
-Lorin Maazel

In this world, there’s even room for quality.
-Lorin Maazel

To be passionate in today’s world is not politically correct… Nowadays we are supposed to cope. This was not Mahler’s problem. He saw it, he heard it, and he expressed it. He was a kaleidoscopic, Olympian figure.
-Lorin Maazel

What our profession is all about is interacting with people.
-Lorin Maazel

Art is a beacon and music happens to be our special beacon. (I wonder if there is a relationship between the words beacon and beckon?) Music most assuredly does sustain us, and beguile and nourish us. What kind of void would be in its absence? Not a pretty thought. So it falls to us to do what it is that we can do. Our contributions to the cause of music can take so many forms and go in so many directions.
-John Mack

If you’re going to play the oboe, you have to have elementary bravery, or you’re in big trouble. Some of them are nutty, wild and unreasonable. I call myself a quintessential Cleveland Orchestra player — orthodox, but zippy, and nonwacko. I hate wacko.
-John Mack

Son, don’t ever take “no” from an inanimate object.
-Attributed to John Mack

Teaching is close to a sacred duty.
-John Mack

Beauty and fullness of tone can be achieved by having the whole orchestra play with high clarinets and a carefully selected number of piccolos.
-Gustav Mahler

If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.
-Gustav Mahler

What is best in music is not to be found in the notes.
-Gustav Mahler

Reason speaks in words alone but love has a song.
-Joseph de Maistre

I decided to make it lyrical, thoroughly stylised: a film in which the whole action of actors, as well as the movement of camera and cutting was rhythmic. Then I got Rodgers and Hart to write the music?. We finished the whole score before I began to work on the script. We did the whole thing to a metronome, because we couldn’t carry an orchestra round with us.
-Rouben Mamoulian (director, referring to the movie Love Me Tonight)

Classical musicians, in my limited experience, are a sheepish and particular group. They resist labels as if they were balls and chains.
-Timothy Mangan

There is something suspicious about music, gentlemen. I insist that she is, by her nature, equivocal. I shall not be going too far in saying at once that she is politically suspect.
-Thomas Mann (1875-1955) German author, critic Herr Settembrini, in The Magic Mountain, ch. 4, “Politically Suspect,” (1924), trans. by H.T. Lowe-Porter (1928)

Music and silence combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music.
-Marcel Marceau

Music conveys moods and images. Even in opera, where plots deal with the structure of destiny, it’s music, not words, that provides power.
-Marcel Marceau

Glorious bouquets and storms of applause … are the trimmings which every
artist naturally enjoys. But to move an audience in such a role, to hear in
the applause that unmistakable note which breaks through good theatre manners
and comes from the heart, is to feel that you have won through to life
itself. Such pleasure does not vanish with the fall of the curtain, but becomes
part of one’s own life.
-Dame Alice Markova (b. 1910) British ballerina, “Giselle and I,” (1960)

I like Wagner’s music much better than anybody’s. It’s so loud that one can talk the whole time without people hearing you.
-Bob Marley

The trouble was that he had set out to write a masterpiece. He had tensed his intellectual muscles and had sweated in his earnestness in order to make each word a jewel, each sentence a concise gem of thought, and the whole a symphony of words; and what was worse, you could tell that he had been thinking of what the critics would say.
-John P. Marquand, Wickford Point

The nerves are a problem on trumpet, because when you mess up everyone can hear it. Just remember most people are too polite to say anything about it. That should calm your nerves.
-Wynton Marsalis

When I’m 40, too old to be a rock star, I plan to go back to college to study classical music.
-Chris Martin (of the band Coldplay)

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.
-Groucho Marx (1890-1977)

Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.
-Pietro Mascagni (Born:  Leghorn, December 7, 1863, Died:  Rome, August 2, 1945)

Think about having the success of your professional career hinging on a piece of bamboo.  A bad reed can make or break an oboist.
-June Matayoshi (article here

It is dangerous to let the public behind the scenes. They are easily disillusioned and then they are angry with you, for it was the illusion they loved.
-William Somerset Maugham

No longer tired, Henry comes away from the wall where he’s been leaning, and walks into the middle of the dark auditorium, toward the great engine of sound. He lets it engulf him. There are these rare moments when musicians together touch something sweeter than they’ve ever found before in rehearsals or performance, beyond the merely collaborative or technically proficient, when their expression becomes as easy and graceful as friendship or love. This is when they give us a glimpse of what we might be, of our best selves, and of an impossible world in which you give everything you have to others, but lose nothing of yourself. Out in the real world there exist detailed plans, visionary projects for peaceable realms, all conflicts resolved, happiness for everyone, for ever˘mirages for which people are prepared to die and kill. Christ’s kingdom on earth, the workers’ paradise, the ideal Islamic state. But only in music, and only on rare occasions, does the curtain actually lift on this dream of community, and it’s tantalisingly conjured, before fading away with the last notes.
-Ian McEwan, Saturday

I have always adored Mahler, and Mahler was a major influence on the music of the Beatles. John and me used to sit and do the Kindertotenlieder and Wunderhorn for hours, we’d take turns singing and playing the piano. We thought Mahler was gear.
-Paul McCartney (1942) British musician, “The “Beatles”

The second big challenge has been learning not to judge this woman: I’ve got to learn to love this woman, but a big part of me wants to slap her; part of me wants to say to her: “Get over it! Find another man, honey! Move on with your life!” Or worse, on my really grumpy days: “Just kill yourself already!”
-Audra McDonald (from her online journal, commenting on La Voix Humaine)

In covering arts organizations over the years as a critic and journalist, I have developed a “McLennan’s Law” test. It goes: the effort an arts organization expends on trying to get butts in seats is often inversely proportional to its overall health. That is: You can always tell a theater or symphony orchestra is in trouble when it starts worrying more about getting people in the seats than it does about inspiring audiences; that’s the point it has become a follower rather than a leader. On the other end - a really successful company with a hot product doesn’t worry much about how it will attract an audience, it pours its efforts into a product it believes in.
-Douglas McLennan

Everyone says “practice makes perfect” but they’re wrong, they should say “practice makes permanent” because whatever you do over and over again is what you’ll do over and over again.
-Drew McManus

Opera chose me. I kicked and screamed and bit against it, but now I have to admit that this is what I’m best at. I’ve said that opera is a dead art, and I still believe that, because nobody is writing any decent ones now. But I don’t care: we have 400 years of it and we only do 20 per cent of what there is. I’m utterly devoted to the art form.
-David McVicar (opera director)

A woman’s life in the orchestra is not as long as a man’s; she is just not as good at 60 as a man is at 60.
-Zubin Mehta (from Time magazine, December 9, 1966, explaining why he enforced a limit of 16 women in the Los Angeles Philharmon

If the King loves music, it is well with the land.
-Mencius

Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.
-H. L. Mencken

Any subject is good for opera if the composer feels it so intently he must sing it out.
-Gian Carlo Menotti

My faith is the grand drama of my life. I’m a believer, so I sing words of God to those who have no faith. I give bird songs to those who dwell in cities and have never heard them, make rhythms for those who know only military marches or jazz, and paint colours for those who see none.
-Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) French composer, organist

Traditional bassoons don’t fit easily under airplane seats, so in the 1960s some makers took a saw to the longest joint of the bassoon and glued the cut-off piece to the bell. (I’m not making this up!) This rearranged design is called a “Gentleman’s Cut” and it allows the bassoon to fit into a shorter case. Thankfully, you don’t need to be a gentleman, or especially ladylike, to play the bassoon; you just need good thumbs.
-Christopher Millard

Poetry and Hums aren’t things which you get, they’re things which get you. And all you can do is to go where they can find you.
-A. A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh

In my music, I’m trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it’s difficult is because I’m changing all the time.
-Charles Mingus

In the end, it was a Bach motet that shooed me away˘choristers weren’t damnably bad, but the organist’s only hope for salvation was a bullet through the brain. Told him so too˘tact and restraint all well and good in small talk, but one mustn’t beat around any bush where music is concerned.
-David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas, p 75

One can spot a fellow musician in any context, even amongst policemen. The craziest-eyed, unruliest-haired one, either hungry-skinny or jovial-portly. This French-speaking, cor anglais-playing, local operatic society belonging inspector had heard of Vyvyan Ayrs and kindly drew me a map to Neerbeke.
-David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas, p 48

Wrong Note!
-Mom (said from the kitchen many a time, when I was practicing piano in the living room)

When you’re doing what you love, you can just let the beauty pass through you. You don’t have to own it.
Robin Moore

Music is an experience, not a science.
-Ennio Morricone

We live in a modern world, and in contemporary music the central fact is contamination. Not the contamination of disease but the contamination of musical styles.
If you find this in me, that is good.
-Ennio Morricone

Music is spiritual. The music business is not.
-Van Morrison

There’s always stress involved in any genre or art form, there’s always going to be a struggle. If there’s no struggle, you wouldn’t do anything. What are you going do? Retire?
-Van Morrison

It is too much for what I do and too little for what I could do.
-Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (referrring to his minor post as chamber musician/composer to Emperor Joseph II)

I was in such high spirits today, I cannot describe it. I p