Conductor Quotes & Sayings

There is an underlying rhythm to all text. Sentences crashing fall like the waves of the sea, and work unconsciously on the reader. Punctuation is the music of language. As a conductor can influence the experience of the song by manipulating its rhythm, so can punctuation influence the reading experience, bring out the best (or worst) in a text. By controlling the speed of a text, punctuation dictates how it should be read. A delicate world of punctuation lives just beneath the surface of your work, like a world of microorganisms living in a pond. They are missed by the naked eye, but if you use a microscope you will find a exist, and that the pond is, in fact, teeming with life. This book will teach you to become sensitive to this habitat. The more you do, the greater the likelihood of your crafting a finer work in every respect. Conversely the more you turn a blind eye, the greater the likelihood of your creating a cacophonous text and of your being misread. — Noah Lukeman

When I am with composers, I say I am a conductor. When I am with conductors, I say I am a composer. — Leonard Bernstein

In fact, these terms devised by Franklin are the ones we still use today, along with other neologisms that he coined to describe his findings: battery, charged, neutral, condense, and conductor. — Walter Isaacson

I don't like to hurry. I'm not a conductor of the fast, fiery romantic type. I prefer Bruckner, with the sincerity of his musical language and the huge time spans in which his ideas develop, to Mahler, with his hysteria and self-indulgence. — Jeffrey Tate

We were not for underestimating magic - a life-conductor like the sap between the tree-stem and the bark. We know that it keeps dullness out of religion and poetry. It is probable that without it we might die. — Freya Stark

Haute couture is like an orchestra, for which only Balenciaga is the conductor. The rest of us are just musicians, following the directions he gives us. — Christian Dior

Shared leadership ... is less like a an orchestra, where the conductor is always in charge, and more like a jazz band, where leadership is passed around ... depending on what the music demands at the moment and who feels most moved by the spirit to express the music. — Phillip C. Schlechty

A conductor should guide rather than command. — Riccardo Muti

[On being asked how it felt to be the first female conductor of the Boston Symphony:] I've been a woman for a little more than fifty years, and I've gotten over my original astonishment. — Nadia Boulanger

In America, they have this nauseating habit of calling the conductor 'maestro'. I always slightly gag when the cor anglais player goes, 'Maestro, can I discuss bar 19 with you?' — Charles Hazlewood

Today's parents have little authority over those others with whom they share the task of raising their children. On the contrary,most parents deal with those others from a position of inferiority or helplessness. Teacher, doctors, social workers, or television producers possess more status than most parents ... As a result, the parent today isa maestro trying to conduct an orchestra of players who have never met and who play from a multitude of different scores, each in a notation the conductor cannot read. — Kenneth Keniston

In getting good results team leaders become conductor rather than driver, enabling others to play the right music, not by hands-on domination of all decisions and execution, but by providing inspiration, motivation and stimulus. — Robert Heller

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. — Richard Hyung-ki Joo

That smell mixed with the scent of getting tied up and fucked became the smell of complete release, of an orchestra connected by the simple movements of a skilled conductor. — C.D. Reiss

I admire Tom Ades: he's a brilliant conductor, and he gets just the right hard, brilliant sound from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra for Russian music. — Charles Hazlewood

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. — Susan Campbell Bartoletti

He raised his hands and, guided by a redeeming impulse of truth-like a conductor leading his orchestra in a grand symphony-finally set fingers to keyboard and let the melody of his story dance across the screen — Jose Rodrigues Dos Santos

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and the passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work. — Carl Sandburg

For me, the most enjoyable type of singing is opera. It allows you to move, to wear a costume ... to do something with your body. When singing in concert, you have to stand up in front of the audience, next to the conductor, which is less natural. — Andrea Bocelli

In truth, I became a conductor because deep down I wanted to conduct Brahms's four symphonies and Richard Strauss's tone poems. — Zubin Mehta

I can't even touch another conductor's baton. The center of gravity, the feel of the handle, puts me totally off. — Jeffrey Tate

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. — Leon Theremin

If we turn to the divine Conductor and follow the wise and loving baton that is His will, His Word, then the music of our life will be a symphony. — Peter Kreeft

If you're not filled back up quickly, you might collapse like a birthday balloon". I guess that's why acting is so addictive. For the director, that addiction will come from the love and trust he gets from the "orchestra", him being the conductor. That's why many directors fall in love with their leading lady/man: having someone say "how do you want me to be" is incredible. — Matthew Jacobs

But what revealed to me all of a sudden the Princess's love was a trifling incident upon which I shall not dwell here, for it forms part of quite another story, in which M. de Charlus allowed a Queen to die rather than miss an appointment with the hairdresser who was to singe his hair for the benefit of an omnibus conductor who filled him with alarm. — Marcel Proust

I have three siblings. My sister makes music. My older brother is a classical conductor, and my younger brother is a mixing engineer. — Lisa Loeb

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 Jarvi

So, first you have to be able to play with a metronome. Then you take your freedom. If you play in an orchestra, you got to watch the conductor, he is like a metronome, but it is more difficult because he can change rhythms. — Ruggiero Ricci

The conductor of an orchestra doesn't make a sound. He depends, for his power, on his ability to make other people powerful. — Benjamin Zander

The singers all loathe the sight of one another, the chorus despises the singers, they both hate the orchestra, and everyone fears the conductor; the staff on one prompt side won't talk to the staff on the opposite prompt side, the dancers are all crazed from hunger in any case ... — Terry Pratchett

The greatest contribution jazz has made in music has been to replace the role of the conductor with a member of the ensemble who, instead of waving his arms to keep time and convey mood, is an active member of the musical statement. That person is the drummer. — Elvin Jones

[A conductor's] happiness does not come from only his own story and his joy of the music. The joy is about enabling other people's stories to be heard at the same time. — Itay Talgam

The great secret is that an orchestra can actually play without a conductor at all. Of course, a great conductor will have a concept and will help them play together and unify them. But there are conductors that actually inhibit the players from playing with each other properly. — Joshua Bell

As soon as we had the music arranged on our stands, Conductor Li tapped his baton on the lectern and called us to attention. "Quiet please, comrades! And as we play just think of the Long March," he said. "I will be at the front, like Chairman Mao. I will beat the time. Try to keep up. If you get lost, skip a few pages. Hopefully, the rest of us will pass your way eventually... The first movement sounded like nothing less than a full-scale military retreat. We were ambushed by missing pages of score, by an impulsive feint by the cellists and double basses, and by a flautist who turned two pages rather than one and played along happily in no man's land for a dozen or so bars until he was rapped on the head with the end of a clarinet (pg 325) — John Sinclair

It's been a thrilling journey - I have had to really learn that an orchestra is an entity - it's a creature. I have been calling it the dragon and the conductor is the dragon tamer. And you just have to ... ride and don't let go and you will be fine. — Tori Amos

Perhaps the chief requirement of [the conductor] is that he be humble before the composer; that he never interpose himself between the music and the audience; that all his efforts, however strenuous or glamorous, be made in the service of the composer's meaning - the music itself, which, after all, is the whole reason for the conductor's existence. — Leonard Bernstein

The carpenter, lab technician, and conductor are all craftsmen because they are dedicated to good work for its own sake. — Richard Sennett

It's no more normal to be a bank-manager or a bus-conductor, than to be Baudelaire or Genghis Khan,' Moreland had once remarked. 'It just happens there are more of the former types. — Anthony Powell

I don't feel that the conductor has real power. The orchestra has the power, and every member of it knows instantaneously if you're just beating time. — Itzhak Perlman

The end result of my personal story is that I became a really good drummer, and I know myself well enough to know that I wouldn't have without this really tough conductor and this really cutthroat hostile environment I was in. — Damien Chazelle

The Prince stood beside the timpanist to count his rests for him and see that he came in in the right place. I suppressed all the trumpet passages which were clearly beyond the players' grasp. The solitary trombone was left to his own devices; but as he wisely confined himself to the notes with which he was thoroughly familiar, such as A flat, D and F, and was careful to avoid all others, his success in the role was almost entirely a silent one. — Hector Berlioz

It's different for people who have not seen a symphony conductor conduct from a chair. I feel very connected to the orchestra in a way that a conductor sometimes does not feel. I think it's more visceral. — Joshua Bell

I was at La Fenice opera house back in 1991 with friends, and we started talking about a conductor whom none of us liked. Somehow there was an escalation, and we started talking about how to kill him, where to kill him. This struck me as a good idea for a book. — Donna Leon

A good conductor ought to be a good chauffeur; the qualities that make the one also make the other. They are concentration, an incessant control of attention, and presence of mind; the conductor only has to add a little sense of music. — Sergei Rachmaninoff

I told him what I thought and he suddenly leapt into the air with joy, like a child: 'Also, wirklich, gut?' [So it was really good?]. Such a titan, and so unsure of himself. — Sviatoslav Richter

The great conductor is always a despot by temperament and intractable in his ways ... The artist is obliged to keep his laughter and tears to himself. If they want to emerge, in spite of himself, then he must hide them or unleash them in someone else. — Nadia Boulanger

The whole duty of a conductor is comprised in his ability to indicate the right tempo. — Richard Wagner

Jobs had begun to drop acid by then, and he turned Brennan on to it as well, in a wheat field just outside Sunnyvale. "It was great," he recalled. "I had been listening to a lot of Bach. All of a sudden the whole field was playing Bach. It was the most wonderful feeling of my life up to that point. I felt like the conductor of this symphony with Bach coming through the wheat. — Walter Isaacson

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. — Colum McCann

I saw a street car conductor today with one brown eye and one blue. Wouldn't he make a nice villain for a detective story? — Jean Webster

The director is a bit analogous to the conductor of a symphony orchestra. It's a collaborative adventure. — Nicholas Meyer

(From Boulez, an authorized biography by Joan Peyser)
At the chapel door he [a priest associated with a school Boulez attended] asked me if what he had been told was true: that Boulez no longer believed in God. I said it was ... — Pierre Boulez

The conductor of the orchestra doesn't make a sound. His power comes from awakening possibility in others. - Benjamin Zander, conductor and coauthor of The Art of Possibility — Malcolm Harkins

I was the most famous conductor on the Underground Railroad. — Harriet Tubman

The conductor's gift does not always go hand in hand with that of composition; indeed, the union is found much more seldom than is popularly believed. — Anton Seidl

Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning-conductor of his existence. — Samuel Beckett

The conductor was eating a young ladies' cinema nibble with a rigid, humourless expression, as though it was the doorstop or hunk of sausage that would have accorded with his personality. — Joseph Roth

The very first time I was on a car in Atlanta, I saw the conductor - all conductors are white - ask a Negro woman to get up and take a seat farther back in order to make a place for a white man. I have also seen white men requested to leave the Negro section of the car. — Ray Stannard Baker

Lately, my mind is like an orchestra. If you don't have the conductor, you don't know what to do. One guy is playing jazz, one guy is playing rock and roll, another classical. It's a big mess. — Goran Ivanisevic

conductor of heat, knowing how to control the temperature and to take advantage of its heating properties is vital when you cook with cast iron. This chapter tells you everything that you need to know. Of course, having a few recipes — Tracy L. Barr

[ ... ] I was afraid to board a streetcar because of the conductor; I was afraid to enter the Kabuki Theater for fear of the usherettes standing along the sides of the red-carpeted staircase at the main entrance; I was afraid to go into a restaurant because I was intimidated by the waiters furtively hovering behind me waiting for my plate to be emptied. — Osamu Dazai

What love is to the heart, appetite is to the stomach. The stomach is the conductor that leads and livens up the great orchestra of our emotions. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

[To the patronizing train conductor who had twice said, 'Auntie, give me your ticket':] Which of my sister's sons are you? — Mary McLeod Bethune

What appeals to me about an American music directorship is the involvement of the conductor with the orchestra and the community. I think that's a fantastic thing. In Europe, being principal conductor means merely that you're the person who does most of the concerts. For me, that simply isn't enough. — Jeffrey Tate

Gioacchino Rossini, the composer of William Tell and many other operas, had a good grasp of the relationship between music and food: "What love is to the heart, appetite is to the stomach. The stomach is the conductor that leads and livens up the great orchestra of our emotions." If — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Zeal, the blind conductor of the will. — John Dryden

I was a guest in the home of a conductor when I was in my early twenties. They turned on the gramophone and played a popular record of a foxtrot. I liked the foxtrot, but I didn't like the way it was played. I confided my opinion to the host, who suddenly said, 'Ah, so you don't like the way it's played? All right, if you want, write down the number by heart and orchestrate it and I'll play it. That is, of course, if you can do it and in a given amount of time: I'm giving you an hour. if you're really a genius, you should be able to write it in an hour.' I did it in 45 minutes. — Dmitri Shostakovich

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. — Damien Chazelle

Fresh proof of the risks you run in writing about players, and of the advisability of not standing to leeward of their self-esteem when one has had the misfortune to wound it in the slightest degree. When you criticize a singer, you do not have his colleagues up in arms against you. Indeed, they generally feel that you have not been severe enough. But the virtuoso instrumentalist who belongs to a well-known musical organization always claims that in criticizing him you are 'insulting' the whole institution, and though the contention is absurd he sometimes succeeds in making the other players believe it. — Hector Berlioz

Monet was like a conductor. He painted with quite a straight arm and used bold strokes. — Richard C. Armitage

If life is a song, and God is the divine conductor, I must consider these trials and troubles as the harmony of my song, for every song needs more than a melody! — Evinda Lepins

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. — Gustavo Dudamel

A conductor should reconcile himself to the realization that regardless of his approach or temperament the eventual result is the same-the orchestra will hate him. — Oscar Levant

We are aware that the conductor is not really making the music, it is making him
if he is relaxed, open and attuned, then the invisible will take possession of him; through him, it will reach us. — Peter Brook

It is so powerful when we can leave behind our ordinary identities, no longer think of ourselves primarily as a conductor, or writer, or salesclerk, and go to a supportive environment to deeply immerse in meditation practice. — Sharon Salzberg

Pulled out my Valery Gergiev trump card and said I would have to call him about getting another hotel. There are many ways in which a soprano relies upon the guidance of a conductor, and not all of them are confined to the stage. As a result of dropping the most powerful name in Russian music today, I got a window and a view. — Renee Fleming

In the high school classroom you are a drill sergent, a rabbi, a shoulder to cry on, a disciplinarian, a singer, a low-level scholar, a clerk, a referee, a clown, a counselor, a dress-code enforcer, a conductor, an apologist, a philosopher, a collaborator, a tap dancer, a politician, a therapist, a fool, a traffic cop, a priest, a mother-father-brother-sister-uncle-aunt, a bookeeper, a critic, a psychologist, the last straw. — Frank McCourt

At every moment, each instrument knew what to play. Its little bit. But none could see the whole thing like this, all at once, only its own part. Just like life. Each person was like a line of music, but nobody knew what the symphony sounded like. Only the conductor had the whole score. — Janet Fitch

I find little in the works of Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner and others when they are led by a conductor who functions like a windmill. — Franz Liszt

Only when every one of us and every nation learns the secret of love for all mankind will the world become a great orchestra, following the beat of the Greatest Conductor of all. — Artur Rodzinski

There were so many specific things from high school jazz band that I remembered: the conductor searching out people who were out of tune, or stopping and starting me for hours in front of the band as they watched. — Damien Chazelle

Aromatherapy without massage is like an orchestra without a conductor — Robert Tisserand

Am I in the wrong place here, or in the wrong life? Did I not recognize, as I sat in a train that raced past a station and did not stop, that I was on the wrong train, and did I not learn from the conductor that the train would not stop at the next station, either, a hundred kilometers away, and did he not also admit to me, whispering with his hand shielding his mouth, that the train would not stop again at all? — Werner Herzog

And if you are strong enough, then you can grow as a conductor more and more. — Kurt Masur

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. — Ian Rankin

Love is the foundation, the mechanism and the conductor of life. — Daniel Marques

I mean, the great secret is that an orchestra can actually play without a conductor at all. Of course, a great conductor will have a concept and will help them play together and unify them. — Joshua Bell

I study the Bible constantly. I teach the Bible. You know, I'm a Bible conductor, and I have a lot of people studies. But also, I see how small things really help people to get over humps in their life. Gives them direction. — George Benson

There is no reason why a joke should not be appreciated more than once. Imagine how little good music there would be if, for example, a conductor refused to play Beethoven's Fifth Symphony on the ground that his audience might have heard it before. — A.P. Herbert

You are the composer and conductor and thus decide what key of life to live. I choose major over minor whenever I can. — Susan Reynolds

The most important thing for the conductor is that he or she listens. Her listening will make things sound a certain way. If the conductor listens well, the musicians listen each other better. The conductor can in effect impose a certain kind of listening for everybody. — Laurence Equilbey

For people never say anything the same way twice; no two of them ever say it the same. The greatest imaginative writer that ever brooded in a lavender robe and a mellowed briar in his teeth, couldn't tell you, though e try for a lifetime, how the simplest strap-hanger will ask the conductor to be let off at the next stop ...
It is all for the taking. All the manuals by frustrated fictioneers on how to write can't give you the first syllable of reality, at any cot, that any common conversation can. All the classics, read and re-read, can't help you catch the ring of truth as does the word heard first-hand. — Nelson Algren

The best advice I ever heard is, don't take anyone else's advice." There's power in this because it puts you in the conductor's seat, right at "the controls" in your life. It doesn't mean you should stop seeking information or outside input, it just means that you're the one driving. You choose your own destination. — Sherry Argov

From Lee's extensive quotes of Edwards on page 152 we can gather that the reason some reject good thoughts that might order their minds aright is because of a disposition of the heart, or a "taste" for evil. The habit of a person's mind is in accordance with his spiritual appetite, a good man's mind will always suggest and supply good and holy thoughts to connect ideas and information to create a beautiful picture in one's mind of God's orderly universe (Himself at the helm) but the evil man's mind is habitually disorganizing the things of this world or rather dis-integrating them from the knowledge of God, and so Edwards might say that his mind is not a cosmos but a chaos, or a conductor-less cacophony rather than a grand symphony. — Erick John Blore

Baton technique is to a conductor what fingers are to a pianist. — Igor Markevitch

It's true that the audience gasped when Nina did her thirty-two fouettees. They began applauding when she was just half way through, so loudly that she couldn't hear the music and had to hope the conductor would simply follow her. With each whip of her leg she spun faster, beads of sweat flying, stinging her eyes - and yet she finished cleanly, precisely, and counted calmly to five before releasing the pose. Secretly, though, Nina finds it cheap, these technical feats. A cheap way to impress, nothing subtle or artful - just virtuostic display, demanding of applause and dropped jaws. Nina wants to do more than fancy tricks; she wants her body to sing, her eyes and her hands and the very angle of her head to convey every nuance of the music, and each facet of whichever character she is called on to play. — Daphne Kalotay

You stand exactly in the middle, poised between heaven and earth, a human conductor for the energy that seeks to flow between these two polarities. — Margot Anand

A music director cannot and should not be chosen on the basis of a first date. It is not so difficult to make a good impression with a single appearance, usually containing some of a conductor's party pieces, works they have performed successfully many times before. — Leonard Slatkin

It seemed there was an announcement every five minutes from the mythical conductor, imparting sagacious gems such as "large items should be placed in the overhead luggage racks", or that "passengers should report any unattended items to the train crew as soon as possible". I wondered at whom these pearls of wisdom were aimed; some passing extraterrestrial, perhaps, or a yak herder from Ulan Bator who had trekked across the steppes, sailed the North Sea, and found himself on the Glasgow-Edinburgh service with literally no prior experience of mechanized transport to call upon? — Gail Honeyman

Then, just at the peak of complacency, when it was assumed that the climate of the world had changed forever, when the conductor of the philharmonic played Vivaldi's Four Seasons and left out an entire movement, and when to children of a young age stories of winter were told as if they were fairy tales, New York was hit by a cataclysmic freeze, and, once again, people huddled together to talk fearfully of the millennium. — Mark Helprin