Orchestral Quotes & Sayings

I think my playing has been orchestral throughout the years, and this is another way of expressing that. But I primarily see it as the ultimate accomplishment of a musician. Composing makes me feel like I've finally gotten all the way up the ladder as a musician. — Tony Williams

Bjork, I'd love to do something with her. I'd love to do some sort of crazy orchestral choir thing with her. — Ellie Goulding

Since there are always talented players in these emerging categories, no matter how grating they may be to the ear of the more traditionally inclined, I was not surprised when the heavy metal band Metallica achieved a style that was huge and orchestral in its guitar textures, showing itself to be perfectly capable of producing beautiful melodies with unusual, finely constructed harmonies. — Linda Ronstadt

Change is ubiquitous. Only: elementary processes cannot be ordered along a common succession of instants. At the extremely small scale of the quanta of space, the dance of nature does not develop to the rhythm kept by the baton of a single orchestral conductor: every process dances independently with its neighbours, following its own rhythm. The passing of time is intrinsic to the world, it is born of the world itself, out of the relations between quantum events which are the world and which themselves generate their own time. — Carlo Rovelli

I think that's one of the things that has always put me in kind of an odd niche. It's that all of my understanding of orchestral music is via film, not via classical music like it's supposed to be. To me it's the same, it doesn't make any difference. — Danny Elfman

If you're using live bass versus orchestral bass, you've got to make sure that you're not stepping on the toes of the other elements, so you've got to balance it out. — Serj Tankian

It's true I've always been attracted to the jazz band in an orchestral way, rather than a band way. — Gerry Mulligan

You're a princess on roller skates. People like you skate through life on shiny gold blades to full orchestral music with the wind at you back. Everything comes easy to skaters ... Everyone loves you — Shelley Coriell

We just sang real simple songs in a simple way that got to people. We didn't try to tart them up with orchestral arrangements and all the stuff. We were all blues fanatics. We like R+B and blues and simple, gut-feeling music. — Mick Ralphs

It's Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony I'm really looking forward to. Simon Rattle does it perfectly: he understands its primal rhythmic life force, and he and the wonderful Berliners make it a sheer riot of orchestral colour. — Charles Hazlewood

Tamsen lay listening to the crashing of the waves on the beach, the symphony of the ocean competing with the orchestral maneuvers of the first birds singing in the dawn. — Toni Kenyon

I'm sure that I was influenced by Goldsmith's large orchestral scores when I started out, and that was because the people who employed me wanted that kind of sound. I wasn't in a position to say, 'Go to Hell!' — James Horner

When it comes to orchestral music, whenever I see a concert with orchestra and strings, and I arrive and there are speakers up, my heart always sinks a little bit, and I think, 'It's going to be down to some sound guy's ideas.' Contact microphones on the violins. I'm a purist, I suppose. — Jonny Greenwood

I suppose I was affected by raw sounds and timbres more than a lot of other composers. Had I been involved with orchestral composing, I think the aspect that would have most endeared me to that field would have been the orchestration. — Wendy Carlos

It was both exciting and frustrating to work with an orchestral group. — Ken Hensley

Most of my recorded material has been in small group configurations. I have not released large orchestral works as recordings because it hasn't been within the realm of possibility. — Bill Dixon

I always dreamed of writing in an orchestral context. But when you finish a piece, you want to hear it. So we played everything with Phish. — Trey Anastasio

Classical - perhaps I should say 'orchestral' - music is so digital, so cut up, rhythmically, pitchwise and in terms of the roles of the musicians. It's all in little boxes. The reason you get child prodigies in chess, arithmetic, and classical composition is that they are all worlds of discontinuous, parceled-up possibilities. — Brian Eno

The orchestral or symphonic music never interested me. — Agnes Obel

I found a brief piece of by Antonio Vivaldi around this time which became my 'Pinhead Mood Music'. Called Al Santo Sepolcro (At The Holy Sepulchre), it opens more like a piece of modern orchestral music, and although it it moves toward Vivaldi's familiar harmonies, there is always the threat that it will fall back into dissonance. The piece progresses in an exquisite agony, poised on a knife edge between beauty and disfigurement, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain. Perfect. — Doug Bradley

Usually when I am approached to do a score for a horror movie, it's to attempt a repeat performance of what I did way back on 'Hellraiser' or 'Jennifer 8' - one of those really orchestral scores. — Christopher Young

The life of matter can be embraced only by an orchestral style, at once polychromatic, polyphonic, and polymorphous, by means of the most extensive analogies. — Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

It's really an orchestral piece featuring a group and it was quite revolutionary at the time and it in fact, it kicked Deep Purple off as a name in Great Britain because it made all the newspapers. Everyone was writing about us. And there was some confusion as to what kind of band we were after that, which is why Deep Purple in Rock is such a hard unbending album of really furious hard heavy rock. Heavy metal hadn't been invented at that point. — Roger Glover

The growing drama has outgrown such toys Of simulated stature, face, and speech: It also peradventure may outgrow The simulation of the painted scene, Boards, actors, prompters, gaslight, and costume, And take for a worthier stage the soul itself, Its shifting fancies and celestial lights, With all its grand orchestral silences To keep the pauses of its rhythmic sounds. — Elizabeth Barrett Browning

I have always studied my parts with the orchestral score and not with the piano reduction. — Placido Domingo

I had come from an orchestral background, but I didn't really have any orchestral pieces for film. — Marco Beltrami

Gertrude Stein, all courage and will, is a soldier of minimalism. Her work, unlike the resonating silences in the art of Samuel Beckett, embodies in its loquacity and verbosity the curious paradox of the minimalist form. This art of the nuance in repetition and placement she shares with the orchestral compositions of Philip Glass. — Elizabeth Hardwick

Greed is not a consequence of poverty. If it were so, why does the art of acquisition continue to hone and whet itself towards ever more sophisticated strategies? Why is there no end to personal betrayal, corporate espionage, and diplomatic deception among nations? In accolade to greed, even semantics and rationalization have graduated to such undreamed-of heights! History, in failing to embrace the truth, always genuflects to the orchestral swings and sways of contemporary power. — Mariano Ngan

One would always like things to get other performances. With the lack of publishing here it's almost impossible to have an orchestral work done abroad because people simply don't know they are there. — John Kinsella

I love making music, I love composing on my computer, just making crazy ethnic slack orchestral tracks, that's one of my fun things. — Casey Abrams

Somerset desperately needs more high-end music making on its doorstep, so the chance to share great music spanning genres as diverse as orchestral classics, trip hop and jazz, in the utterly relaxed and cathartic environment of a Somerset field, is for me the fulfilment of a long-term dream. — Charles Hazlewood

Haida preferred to listen to instrumental music, chamber music, and vocal recordings. Music where the orchestral component was loud and prominent wasn't to his liking. — Haruki Murakami

When I'm alone at home, I really prefer to listen to Wagner's orchestral music rather than any vocal music. I find it illuminating not to have to pay attention to voices in the recordings. — Kiri Te Kanawa

The morning is full of storm
in the heart of summer.
The clouds travel like white handkerchiefs of goodbye,
the wind, travelling, waving them in its hands.
The numberless heart of the wind
beating above our loving silence.
Orchestral and divine, resounding among the trees
like a language full of wars and songs. — Pablo Neruda

I usually speak with all my drummers so that I write my songs with them in mind, and we'll have bass sounds, choir sounds, and then you can multi-task with all these orchestral sounds. Through the magic medium of technology, I can play all kinds of sounds - double bass and stuff. — Bat For Lashes

I'm obviously very keen on the theater and I think it's inevitable that some of the orchestral and chamber pieces have got dramatic elements which might even suggest an unspecified dramatic plot of some kind or other, even though it's not in my mind at the time. — Peter Maxwell Davies

A review of his work: His music soon spread throughout Europe, and he was invited to America were he performed the Piano Concerto. He would have wished that he would be remembered as an opera composer, but it was to be his orchestral extravaganzas, mainly the trilogy of Roman pictures that has made his name famous. — Ottorino Respighi

Victor Hernandez, like an orchestral conductor directing his troops ... — Jon Champion

For a short while she considered the idea of orchestral courtesy. Certainly one should avoid giving political offence: German orchestras, of course, used to be careful about playing Wagner abroad, at least in some countries, choosing instead German composers who were somewhat more ... apologetic. — Alexander McCall Smith

My mother's father was Jewish, so she was very conservative. She liked little, pretty music-orchestral-type things. — Andrae Crouch

Talk - half-talk, phrases that had no need to be finished, abstractions, Chinese bells played on with cotton-tipped sticks, mock orange blossoms painted on porcelain. The muffled, close, half-talk of soft-fleshed women. The men she had embraced, and the women, all washing against the resonance of my memory. Sound within sound, scene within scene, woman within woman - like acid revealing an invisible script. One woman within another eternally, in a far-reaching procession, shattering my mind into fragments, into quarter tones which no orchestral baton can ever make whole again. — Anais Nin

I have very eclectic taste in music. I like everything from Nirvana, which is featured in the film, to world music, to orchestral and jazz. For me, the nineties were about Oasis, because I was travelling around Britain when that band exploded onto the music scene. — Isla Fisher

Originally, I wanted a pop career and formed a girl-band 'Genie Queen' managed by Andy McClusky from 'Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark', but it didn't work out. My brother John is the talented singer and song-writer with 'The Razz,' while my other brother Sean is a footballer for Telford United. — Abbey Clancy

The baritone can serve functions that the alto and tenor cannot, in orchestral voicing. — Gerry Mulligan

In Berlin I especially enjoyed the orchestral concerts, and I attended a large number of them. I formed the acquaintance of a good many musicians, several of whom spoke of my playing in high terms. — James Weldon Johnson

I feel at home in an orchestral score. — Placido Domingo

I have always loved the idea of losing when beauty is gained from the loss, when there is deep, orchestral consequence to what is ending...But real failure is muted and swift, especially in the minor leagues, especially at this level. There are no options to it, no metaphor attached. No wisdom to be gained. — Lucas Mann

The embrace of present and past time, in which English antiquarianism becomes a form of alchemy, engenders a strange timelessness. It is as if the little bird which flew through the Anglo-Saxon banqueting hall, in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, gained the outer air and became the lark ascending in Vaughan Williams's orchestral setting. The unbroken chain is that of English music itself. — Peter Ackroyd

The act of vomiting deserves your respect. It's an orchestral event of the gut. — Mary Roach

You need a platform upon which to release an orchestral record, otherwise it's just going to be an obscurity. — Elvis Costello

Affectors Harmagedon is a solid blast of PROG metal complete with burning solos, odd time signatures, orchestral highlights, and Rock riffs that will tear your head off! Excited that I could be a part of this album! — Jordan Rudess

So it became in my mind a nine-carol service; an oratorio and orchestral concert all in one, but with narration. That's something I've learned about, because it's the story that keeps you in there. I wrote a libretto and I gave it to John [Du Prez, Idle's co-writer of many years]. We normally don't work in this fashion but I said off you go, and he went off for about three months. He brought me back this demo which blew my mind. — Eric Idle

I was classically trained. But more than just the fact that I play violin, there's a lot of classical elements in the way I write, in the way I hear chords. A lot of times, I think of my songs as a symphony made out of electronics rather than instruments. And I love to do orchestral arrangements of my songs after they're done. — Lindsey Stirling

I've got my own studio, and I've got four- to five-hundred unreleased tracks. I've got stuff that's electronic, orchestral, jazz, I've got rock, I've got metal, you know, I don't have polka. — Serj Tankian

'The Black Parade' is an epic, theatrical, orchestral, big record that is also a concept album. — Gerard Way

My personal relationship with music is an imperfect harmony because I never studied music, but here I am not just writing for bands but full orchestral sections and doing all this composition, and I never learned the right way of doing things so I have a lot of dissonant sounds and things that are brought to my attention, and generally I leave them that way because I like those imperfections. — Serj Tankian

Yes was a band where we could explore some of those ideas, but I knew that if I wanted to get into orchestral music and make a living at it, movies seemed to be a perfect spot. — Trevor Rabin

I never liked opera growing up. I always liked chamber music or solo music even more than orchestral music. — Tod Machover

If you wish, gentle reader, you may augment your mental tableau with dramatic orchestral accompaniment. — Marie Brennan

After moving to Los Angeles in the early '90s, I started looking into "music for picture" more seriously and in broader scope. My collaboration as a programmer and arranger with Graeme Revell exposed me for the first time to the full spectrum of film music, including the hectic demands of orchestral scoring and the power politics surrounding the finalization of any score for a major motion picture in Hollywood. — Paul Haslinger

You know, a lot of people are loath to go to an orchestral concert because they are intimidated by the thought. — Anthony Daniels

Jon Anderson and I, we really liked a lot of classical music, and we wanted to get some orchestral arrangements going on 'Time And A Word.' — Chris Squire