Conductors' careers are made for the most part with 'Romantic' music. 'Classic' music eliminates the conductor; we do not remember him in it. |
Just as appetite comes by eating, so work brings inspiration, if inspiration is not discernible at the beginning. |
I was born out of due time in the sense that by temperament and talent I should have been more suited for the life of a small Bach, living in anonymity and composing regularly for an established service and for God. |
Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being? |
Music is given to us with the sole purpose of establishing an order in things, including, and particularly, the coordination between man and time. |
A good composer does not imitate; he steals. |
What force is more potent than love? |
The Church knew what the psalmist knew: Music praises God. Music is well or better able to praise him than the building of the church and all its decoration; it is the Church's greatest ornament. |
Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven. |
What gives the artist real prestige is his imitators. |
I am in the present. I cannot know what tomorrow will bring forth. I can know only what the truth is for me today. That is what I am called upon to serve, and I serve it in all lucidity. |
The real composer thinks about his work the whole time; he is not always conscious of this, but he is aware of it later when he suddenly knows what he will do. |
Money may kindle, but it cannot by itself, and for very long, burn. |
Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody's piano playing in my living room has on the book I am reading. |
The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution. |
I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it. |
A plague on eminence! I hardly dare cross the street anymore without a convoy, and I am stared at wherever I go like an idiot member of a royal family or an animal in a zoo; and zoo animals have been known to die from stares. |
The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music they should be taught to love it instead. |
Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end. |
I am an inventor of music. |