Don't bother to look, I've composed all this
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
Only become a musician if there is absolutely no
other way you can make a living. - Kirke Mecham,
on his life as a composer
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
by one's conversation. - Oscar Wilde
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
There are still so many beautiful things to be
said in C major. - Sergei Prokofiev
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
God
tells me how the music should sound, but you
stand in the way. - Arturo Toscanini to a
trumpet player
Already too loud! - Bruno Walter at his first
rehearsal with an American orchestra, on seeing
the players reaching for their instruments
When she started to play, Steinway himself came
down personally and rubbed his name off the
piano. - Bob Hope, on comedienne Phyllis Diller
Never look at the trombones, it only encourages
them. - Richard Strauss
In
opera, there is always too much singing. -
Claude Debussy
Oh
how wonderful, really wonderful, opera would be
if there were no singers! - Gioacchino Rossini
Theirs (the Beatles') is a happy, cocky,
belligerently resourceless brand of harmonic
primitivism... In the Liverpudlian repertoire,
the indulged amateurishness of the musical
material, though closely rivaled by the
indifference of the performing style, is
actually surpassed only by the ineptitude of the
studio production method. "Strawberry Fields"
suggests a chance encounter at a mountain
wedding between Claudio Monteverdi and a jug
band. - Glenn Gould
It's pretty clear now that what looked like it
might have been some kind of counterculture is,
in reality, just the plain old chaos of
undifferentiated weirdness. - Jerry Garcia
