Mark Foster Quotes

So when I'm playing, I'm sort of painting a feeling in the air.

In song the same rule applies as in dramatic verse: the meaning must yield itself, or yield itself sufficiently to arouse the attention and interest, in real time.

What I do is creative. It doesn't seem like that when I'm playing a piece that was written in the past, but the score is just the outline and everything in it is relative. The key is to make this piece written by someone else belong to you and then connect to the audience.

The conductor must breathe life into the score. It is you and you alone who must expose it to the understanding, reveal the hidden jewel to the sun at the most flattering angles.

You kind of have to become a song so to speak and we wanted to make sure that Tom did them with the best abilities he had and captured all that what the song is all about.

If I can't get a mental image from the song, I won't sing it.

Write your own songs. It helps you to mean what you're singing, which will then make it mean something to listeners.

I'm not really a songwriter - I'm an interpreter. So in a sense I am an actress first and foremost. I act out the songs, and I lead with my heart.

There's not only emotion in the way you sing but also in what you sing. That way I can compensate it.

I learned, too, how it was possible with the help of the picture and action to transform an apparently insignificant violin passage into an incident, and to lift a simple horn call into a thing of stupendous significance by means of scenic emphasis.

When an audience comes to one of my concerts, I hope they'll see themselves, somewhere, in one of the songs.

Songs suffer at the mercy of the performer.

For my money, Tony Bennett is the best singer in the business. He excites me when I watch him. He moves me. He's the singer who gets across what the composer has in mind, and probably a little more.

As a singer, you have to bring the soul to the song.

I feel music-making is more like a psychological game; each film has its own colour that needs to be identified and addressed.

Like dancers with choreography or actors with scripts, jazz singers could take material that was known, even loved, then risk interpreting and revising it. They could conceal even as they revealed themselves. Inflection, timing and tonality were their language, at least as much as words.

The music should speak for itself, and hopefully it will.

And I like to interpret music. So I think it's all interpretive.

In some ways, I've always approached singing as acting, and the voice is just like a way of carrying the song.

I tend to explain my songs.

When you write a song you have an idea of how it should be sung but it doesn't work out that way if someone else records it.

I want my music to do the explaining.

Is it not the business of the conductor to convey to the public in its dramatic form the central idea of a composition; and how can he convey that idea successfully if he does not enter heart and soul into the life of the music and the tale it unfolds?

Wanting to be understood by an audience that didn't know Russian, I tried to paint musical pictures by emphasizing the phrasing, using voice color more boldly, and varying the shade and nuance.

The character of instrumental music... lets the emotions radiate and shine in their own character without presuming to display them as real or imaginary representations.