Ruggiero Ricci Quotes

I think this orchestra's strengths involve drama and voice.

Music is the silence between the notes.

Music is a performing art, as any Native American will tell you. It isn't there in the score.

Improvising is writing, too - there was no music and now there's music. So that's composition. And any time you take any sort of a performance liberty, you're making a compositional choice. I don't know a serious performer who hasn't made compositional decisions, who hasn't engaged in the art of composition.

The ballet embodies the notes of music. And sometimes you almost feel like you can see the notes dance up there on the stage.

The first condition for making music is not to make a noise.

Well, rhythm is 90 percent of the interpretation.

We need improvement in the style of performance. There is no more advantage in a musician who plays and conducts than in one who is only a beater of rhythm.

If you want me to play only the notes without any specific dynamics, I will never make one mistake.

Rhythm is something you either have or don't have, but when you have it, you have it all over.

What I have to do as a musician is do everything that is not on the music.

To me, playing an instrument and singing, all of these different things are just as natural to me as rhyming.

There's not a note of mine that's worth the noting.

Acting is just playing the violin in an orchestra. Directing is being the conductor.

In music, the punctuation is absolutely strict, the bars and rests are absolutely defined. But our punctuation cannot be quite strict, because we have to relate it to the audience. In other words we are continually changing the score.

You may feel that Peter Martins' 'Beauty' is too compressed and inexpressive, but it's loyal to the text.

The art of interpretation is not to play what is written.

My pure love is playing music.

I am an interpreter of music rather than a composer of it.

If you listen to the way I speak, I have a lot of rhythm, use a lot of accents. When I'm playing my instrument, that concept comes through very clearly.

Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.

I love music more just in and of itself. I love harmony and rhythm.

Behind the notes, something different is told, and that's what the interpreter must find out. He may sit down and play one passage one way and then perhaps exaggerate the next, but, in any event, he must do something with the music. The worst thing is not to do anything.

Balanchine was just able to strike the balance between literal narrative and abstract dance.

Technique is superficial. The method used in applying technique is what gives music its character.