Page 1 of 1

Fun Musical Quotes

Posted: Tue May 15, 2007 12:43 pm
by Bandmaster
I found this list of fun musical quotes on another web forum this morning and thought you all would enjoy them too:

Don't bother to look, I've composed that already.
-- - Gustav Mahler to Bruno Walter, who had stopped to admire mountain scenery in rural Austria.

Already too loud!
- - - Bruno Walter at his first rehearsal with an American orchestra, as the players reached for their instruments

Never look at the trombones, it only encourages them.
- - - Richard Strauss

If a young man at the age of 23 can write a symphony like that, in five years he will be ready to commit murder.
- - - Walter Damrosch on Aaron Copland

There are still so many beautiful things to be said in C major.
- - - Sergei Prokofiev

God tells me how the music should sound, but you stand in the way.
- - - Arturo Toscanini to a trumpet player

Oh how wonderful, really wonderful, opera would be if there were no singers!
- - - Gioacchino Rossini

After I die, I shall return to earth as a gatekeeper of a bordello and I won't let any of you enter.
- - - Arturo Toscanini to the NBC Orchtra

Flint must be an extremely wealthy town: I see that each of you bought two or three seats.
- - - Victor Borge, playing to a half-filled house in Flint, Mich.

I don't play requests...unless, of course, I'm asked to do so.
- - - Victor Borge

It was nice working with some of you guys.
- - - Chuck Findley

I love Beethoven, especially the poems.
- - - Ringo Starr

Richard Strauss during an orchestra-rehearsal: "Tuba, too loud again!". He was told, "Maestro, he's not here today!" Richard Strauss, "Well, you tell him, once he's back!"

John Lanchberry at an American Ballet Theater Rehearsal in Los Angeles:
Violinist: “Hey maestro, why do I always have to play second violin?”
J.L. : “Because there are no thirds.”

Posted: Tue May 15, 2007 1:25 pm
by Hostrauser
IGOR STRAVINSKY:
"Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 percent playing out of tune."

"I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge."

"Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end."

"Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don't like, it's always by Villa-Lobos?"


AARON COPLAND:
"A melody is not merely something you can hum."

"If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong."

"Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like staring at a cow for forty-five minutes."


JOHN PHILIP SOUSA:
"Composers are the only people who can hear good music above bad sounds."

"I have always believed that 98% of a student's progress is due to his own efforts, and 2% to his teacher."


JEAN SIBELIUS:
(explaining why he rarely invited musicians to his house)
"[Musicians] talk of nothing but money and jobs. Give me businessmen every time. They really are interested in music and art."


GUSTAV HOLST:
"Never compose anything unless the not composing of it becomes a positive nuisance to you."

Posted: Tue May 15, 2007 4:03 pm
by PGOK
Hostrauser wrote:IGOR STRAVINSKY:
"Harpists spend 90 percent of their lives tuning their harps and 10 percent playing out of tune."
I literally laughed out loud!!

It reminded of another harp joke, something along the lines of-

If someone opens a door in South America, a harpist in Germany will have to retune.

I like to find quotes about music from people in differnt fields. Here are a few:

"Where words fail, music speaks"
----Hans Christian Anderson


"Music is the Universal Language of Mankind."
----Henry Wadsworth Longfellow


"Music is the shorthand of emotion. Emotions which let themselves be
described in words with such difficulty, are directly conveyed. . . in music, and in that is it’s power and significance."
----Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)


"Music is the Crystallization of sound."
----Henry David Thoreau


"Music produces a kind of pleasure which human nature cannot do without."
--- Confucius

Posted: Fri May 18, 2007 7:20 am
by musicallife
Don't forget to dry clean your instruments...ME

Posted: Fri May 18, 2007 9:10 am
by LoyalTubist
"He'd be better off shoveling snow."--Richard Strauss on Arnold Schoenberg.

When told that a soloist would need six fingers to perform his concerto, Arnold Schoenberg replied, "I can wait."

"I would like to hear Elliot Carter's Fourth String Quartet, if only to discover what a cranky prostate does to one's polyphony."--James Sellars

"Exit in case of Brahms"--Philip Hale's proposed inscription over the doors of Boston Symphony Hall.

"Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don't like, it's always by Villa Lobos?"--Igor Stravinsky

"His music used to be original. Now it's aboriginal."--Sir Ernest Newman on Igor Stravinsky

"If he'd been making shellcases during the war it might have been better for music."--Maurice Ravel on Camille SaintSaens

"He has an enormously wide repertory. He can conduct anything, provided it's by Beethoven, Brahms or Wagner. He tried Debussy's La Mer once. It came out as Das Merde."--Anonymous Orchestra Member on George Szell

Someone commented to Rudolph Bing, manager of the Metropolitan Opera, that George Szell is his own worst enemy. "Not while I'm alive, he isn't!" said Bing.

"We cannot expect you to be with us all the time, but perhaps you could be good enough to keep in touch now and again."--Sir Thomas Beecham to a musician during a rehearsal

"Jack Benny played Mendelssohn last night. Mendelssohn lost."--Anonymous

The great German conductor Hans von Bülow detested two members of an orchestra, who were named Schultz and Schmidt. Upon being told that Schmidt had died, von Bülow immediately asked, "Und Schultz?"

"Her voice sounded like an eagle being goosed."--Ralph Novak on Yoko Ono

"Parsifal is the kind of opera that starts at six o'clock and after it has been going three hours, you look at your watch and it says 6:20."--David Randolph

"One can't judge Wagner's opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don't intend hearing it a second time." - Gioacchino Rossini

"I liked the opera very much. Everything but the music." - Benjamin Britten on Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress

"Her singing reminds me of a cart coming downhill with the brake on."--Sir Thomas Beecham on an unidentified soprano in Die Walküre

"My sole inspiration is a telephone call from a producer." - Cole Porter

"Don't bother to look, I've composed that already."--Gustav Mahler to Bruno Walter, who had stopped to admire mountain scenery in rural Austria.

"I would rather play 'Chiquita Banana' and have my swimming pool than play Bach and starve."--Xavier Cugat

"(Musicians) talk of nothing but money and jobs. Give me businessmen every time. They really are interested in music and art." - Jean Sibelius, explaining why he rarely invited musicians to his home.

"The amount of money one needs is terrifying."--Ludwig Van Beethoven

"I am not handsome, but when women hear me play, they come crawling to my feet."--Niccolo Paganini

"Flint must be an extremely wealthy town: I see that each of you bought two or three seats."--Victor Borge, playing to a half-filled house in Flint, Mich.

"If one hears bad music it is one's duty to drown it out by one's conversation."--Oscar Wilde

"Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together."--Mel Brooks

"Life can't be all bad when for 10 dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for 10 years."--William F.
Buckley Jr.

"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

"Wagner's music is better than it sounds."--Mark Twain

"If a young man at the age of 23 can write a symphony like that, in five years he will be ready to commit murder."--Walter Damrosch on Aaron Copland

"I never use a score when conducting my orchestra. Does a lion tamer enter a cage with a book on how to tame a lion?"--Dimitri Mitropoulos

"I really don't know whether any place contains more pianists than Paris, or whether you can find more asses and virtuosos anywhere."--Frederic Chopin

"When she started to play, Steinway himself came down personally and rubbed his name off the piano."--Bob Hope, on comedienne Phyllis Diller

"In opera, there is always too much singing."--Claude Debussy

Posted: Fri May 18, 2007 1:29 pm
by JazzGeek
"Jazz is not dead...it just smells funny." - Frank Zappa

"All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff." - FZ

"Art is making something out of nothing and selling it." - FZ

"You could sit around in a room, in a base-ment with a set of drums all day long and practice rudiments, and try to develop speed, but until you start playing with a band, you can't learn technique, you can't learn taste, you can't learn how to play with a band and for a band until you actually play." - Buddy Rich

"Almost everything I've done, I've done through my own creativity. I don't think I ever had to listen to anyone else to learn how to play drums. I wish I could say that for about ten thousand other drummers." - BR

"I've played with the greatest musicians in the world. How dare you play like that for me!" - BR

Posted: Tue Nov 20, 2007 12:15 am
by bulldog horn
"It still sounds like barf" OTM

Posted: Tue Nov 20, 2007 9:03 pm
by dizzydude1968
"what the composer giveth the band director taketh away"

robert gibson
director of bands/percussion god- saugus high

(he frequenty "changes" pieces of music for various reasons.. usually by cutting sections out haha)

Posted: Tue Nov 20, 2007 11:01 pm
by thatonehornguy
To make it sound better, all you have to do is play higher, faster, and louder
-A band director I had before I moved that was teaching me how to play trumpet

I soon switched to the French Horn :jester: