Us Conductors Quotes & Sayings

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

Books are the best conductors of knowledge, they transfer knowledge efficiently from one human to another with 0% knowledge loss inbetween. — Chandan Sharma

I look at composers and conductors, anybody involved in music or writing or art in general; they got more done as they got older. If I can, I'll be one of those people because what I do is my passion. — Sarah Brightman

Of course, all people have their own reasons for believing what they do about gender. In my case, in over two decades of collaborating with men and women in music - conductors or otherwise - I have seen no distinction. — Michael Hersch

This year - a factory of semiconductors. Next year - a factory of whole conductors! — Todor Zhivkov

Conducting is more difficult than playing a single instrument. You have to know the culture, to know the score, and to project what you want to hear. Some conductors are well prepared but cannot transmit their ideas to an orchestra, and others are good communicators but have nothing to transmit because they are not absorbed enough in the score. — Pierre Boulez

The train is speeding into a luminous future. Lenin is at the controls. Suddenly - stop, the tracks come to an end. Lenin calls on the people for additional, Saturday work, tracks are laid down, and the train moves on. Now Stalin is driving it. Again the tracks end. Stalin orders half the conductors and passengers shot, and the rest he forces to lay down new tracks. The train starts again. Khrushchev replaces Stalin, and when the tracks come to an end, he orders that the ones over which the train has already passed be dismantled and laid down before the locomotive. Brezhnev takes Khrushchev's place. When the tracks end again, Brezhnev decides to pull down the window blinds and rock the cars in such a way that the passengers will think the train is still moving forward. (Yurii Boriev, Staliniad, 1990) — Ryszard Kapuscinski

A good example of how it must have been is today's world of conducting, which is still utterly dominated by men, and the prejudice the few female conductors have to battle even today is astounding. — Lara St. John

The great leaders are like the best conductors - they reach beyond the notes to reach the magic in the players. — Blaine Lee

The eloquence of one stimulates all the rest, some up to the speaking-point, and all others to a degree that makes them good receivers and conductors, and they avenge themselves for their enforced silence by increased loquacity on their return. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Men of extraordinary success, in their honest moments, have always sung, "Not unto us, not unto us." According to the faith of their times, they have built altars to Fortune, or to Destiny, or to St. Julian. Their success lay in their parallelism to the course of thought, which found in them an unobstructed channel; and the wonders of which they were the visible conductors seemed to their eye their deed. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Few of us boggle - though we should - at the fact that Louis Armstrong sang and played trumpet with similar panache, or that Leonard Bernstein and Benjamin Britten were equally adept as composers, conductors and pianists. — Terry Teachout

They gave me four weeks, and I asked if the first week could be just music with the two main conductors. So, the conductors came over to my home, and we worked in the music room, and I learned my two little songs. — Rue McClanahan

I have a big problem with conductors who gesture a lot. — James Levine

Conductors don't suffer, they are part of the performance. — Michael Tippett

I see Professionalism as a spreading disease of the present-day world, a sort of poly-oligarchy by which various groups (subway conductors, social workers, bricklayers) can bring things to a halt if their particular demands are not met. (Meanwhile, the irrelevance of each profession increases, in proportion to its increasing rigidity.) Such lucky groups demand more in each go-round - but meantime, the number who are permanently unemployed grows and grows. — Ted Nelson

Nouns now turn overnight into verbs. We target goals and we access facts. Train conductors announce that the train won't platform. A sign on an airport door tells me that the door is alarmed. Companies are downsizing. It's part of an ongoing effort to grow the business. "Ongoing" is a jargon word whose main use is to raise morale. We face our daily job with more zest if the boss tells us it's an ongoing project; we give more willingly to institutions if they have targeted our funds for ongoing needs. Otherwise we might fall prey to disincentivization. — William Zinsser

Below birds crossing the lake of the sky
and purple martins on power lines, down
to the trees and one thing my brother said
that stays with me from Long Island to Vermont,
something about trees being conductors
of spirit ... — Anne Marie Macari

The gentleness of the English civilisation is perhaps its most marked characteristic. You notice it the moment you set foot on English soil. It is a land where bus conductors are good-tempered and policemen carry no revolvers. In no country inhabited by white men is it easier to shove people off the pavement. — George Orwell

Every purely natural object is a conductor of divinity, and we have but to expose ourselves in a clean condition to any of these conductors, to be fed and nourished by them. Only in this way can we procure our daily spirit bread. — John Muir

Technique is communication: the two words are synonymous in conductors. — Leonard Bernstein

The merit of poetry, in its wildest forms, still consists in its truth-truth conveyed to the understanding, not directly by the words, but circuitously by means of imaginative associations, which serve as its conductors. — Thomas B. Macaulay

Composers are not all good conductors. — Anton Seidl

Conductors' careers are made for the most part with 'Romantic' music. 'Classic' music eliminates the conductor; we do not remember him in it. — Igor Stravinsky

I think conductors do spend too little time with their orchestras. — Zubin Mehta

The imagination ... that reconciling and mediatory power, which incorporating the reason in images of the sense and organizing (as it were) the flux of the senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truths of which they are the conductors. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

What are our conductors giving us year after year? Only fresh corpses. Over these beautifully embalmed sonatas, toccatas, symphonies and operas the public dance the jitterbug. Night and day without let the radio drowns us in a hog-wash of the most nauseating, sentimental ditties. From the churches comes the melancholy dirge of the dead Christ, a music which is no more sacred than a rotten turnip. — Henry Miller

To be in any form, what is that?
(round and round we go, all of us, and ever come back thither,)
If nothing lay more develop'd the quahung in it's callous shell were enough.
Mine is no callous shell.
I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,
they seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.
I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and I am happy, to touch my person to someone else's is about as much as I can stand. — Walt Whitman

Catalysts are the conductors who choreograph the chemical dance that results in the formation of new structures. — Robert H. Grubbs

I was different from most young conductors today. — Kurt Masur

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

Today we can establish Sharia law because our nation will acquire well-being only with Islam and Sharia. The Muslim Brothers and the Freedom and Justice Party will be the conductors of these goals, — Mohammed Morsi

Conductors are performers. — Michael Tilson Thomas

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

Hover boards, unfortunately, currently violate the laws of physics. Supermagnets exist, but they have to be cooled to near absolute zero, and they are extremely expensive. So Michael J. Fox's hover boards are not possible until we invent room temperature super conductors. — Michio Kaku

It can only be hoped that the overwhelming factual (not anecdotal) evidence presented herein will arouse conductors and performers of all stripes to rededi-cate themselves to serving, rather than using, the art of music - espousing the notion and principle that a great composer's creations ought to be inherently respected and cherished. Perhaps one could then supplant the motto "nobody gives a damn about the composer" with the more benign, gracious - and simple - "all for the composer. — Gunther Schuller

Smiley himself was one of those solitaires who seem to have come into the world fully educated at the age of eighteen. Obscurity was his nature, as well as his profession. The byways of espionage are not populated by the brash and colourful adventurers of fiction. A man who, like Smiley, has lived and worked for years among his country's enemies learns only one prayer: that he may never, never be noticed. Assimilation is his highest aim, he learns to love the crowds who pass him in the street without a glance; he clings to them for his anonimity and his safety. His fear makes him servile - he could embrace the shoppers who jostle him in their impatience, and force him from the pavement. He could adore the officials, the police, the bus conductors, for the terse indifference of their attitudes. (ch. 9) — John Le Carre

So many times, I've seen conductors that, every time they have a thought, they stop the orchestra and say it, and I can see the orchestra rolling their eyes and saying, 'Oh, God, he stopped again.' So there's a technique to rehearsing. — Joshua Bell

Conducting, I tried it once off the cuff, and quickly realized there were subtle aspects that I was missing. There is a lot more to it that I was able to grasp simply by watching conductors. — Carter Burwell

I've always been accused of moving around too much when I play concertos. Sometimes, conductors ask me which of us is leading. — Joshua Bell

The intensity of being in front of all these incredible musicians and tremendous conductors in these elaborate halls can be overwhelming. — Idina Menzel

Many, many years ago, I was one of the few conductors who talked to the audience and now a lot of classical conductors have figured it out ... otherwise, you just get the back of someone's head playing music you could hear on a CD. It's not enough anymore. — Marvin Hamlisch