Quotes

[Alex C]

Just found a bunch of these while I was cleaning out my computer. Hope you like them.

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

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

[tubafatness]

(Supposedly said after an ensemble played through one of his scores as slow as possible and as soft as possible.)

It’s too fu**in’ loud, and it’s too fu**in’ fast.
-Morton Feldman

[djwesp]

"I want as much s**t in your sound as possible."

~Pete Bond, New York Met



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!"

[Norm Pearson]

John Lanchberry at an American Ballet Theater Rehearsal in Los Angeles:
Violinist: “Hey maestro, why do I always have to play second violin?â€

[Ted Cox]

One summer I was in Harvey Phillips' office and he had just finished a rehearsal with the Festival Orchestra, performing a work written by Milton Babbit. It was a commissioned work.
I asked Harvey how he liked the work and he said,"Babbit's a great mathematician, but his music doesn't add up."
Classic Harvey Phillips.

[Ed Jones]

"The more valves a tuba has, the more valves it needs."

"I can find NO redeming qualities about this tuba."

"I don't have time to fix it now. Just pretend to play." (you have to hear the whole story).

"Oh my God, what's THAT?" (at the end of a DWS concert in Tulsa)


All of the above atributed to the great Alex C.

[Steve Marcus]

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

~ Victor Borge