Quotes & Sayings About Conducting Music

You can't expect someone born into a family with no music ... to understand when I'm conducting the Schoenberg Variations. — Daniel Barenboim

Conducting" is when you draw "designs" in the nowhere-with a stick, or with your hands-which are interpreted as "instructional messages" by guys wearing bow ties who wish they were fishing. — Frank Zappa

There's something beautifully friendly and elevating about a bunch of guys playing music together. This wonderful little world that is unassailable. It's really teamwork, one guy supporting the others, and it's all for one purpose, and there's no flies in the ointment, for a while. And nobody conducting, it's all up to you. It's really jazzthat's the big secret. Rock and roll ain't nothing but jazz with a hard backbeat. — Keith Richards

The alarm in the morning? Well, I have an old tape of Carlo Maria Giulini conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in a perfectly transcendent version in Shubert's seventh symphony. And I've rigged it up so that at exactly 7:30 every morning it falls from the ceiling onto my face. — Stephen Fry

In symphonic music, when you are conducting, you do the same thing. You are feeling the whole orchestra, thinking ahead so you can prepare for a change. — David Amram

I love conducting. What I'm tired of is music administration. I don't want that. I just want to make music. — Daniel Barenboim

The act of conducting in itself, of waving my arms in the air and being in charge, I didn't miss. I missed the sensual pleasure of being in contact with music. — Esa-Pekka Salonen

Any performer tries to perform music as if for the first time, with all that energy and excitement that comes from discovering a new piece--maybe trying to recreate the memory of falling in love with a piece when hearing it first as a child--and just as people regularly say of a brilliant conductor that they seem to conduct as if recreating the energy an audience must have felt when the piece was first played decades, even centuries, before, so too I think we need to communicate our knowledge with the passion we first encountered as children. — Armando Iannucci

The real art of conducting consists in transitions. — Gustav Mahler

Today, conducting is a question of ego: a lot of people believe they are actually playing the music. — Daniel Barenboim

My music wouldn't sound the way it does if I hadn't had the experience of conducting. — Esa-Pekka Salonen

After conducting a concert in a small town, I once received the following note from a farmer who had attended the performance: "Dear Sir, I wish to inform you that the man who played the long thing you pull in and out only did so during the brief periods you were looking at him." — Arturo Toscanini

Our tests, our approaches...are ridiculously inadequate. They only show us deficits, they do not show us powers; they only show us puzzles and schemata, when we need to see music, narrative, play, a being conducting itself spontaneously in its own natural way. — Oliver Sacks