Peter Maxwell Davies Quotes

I love doing concert music.

I love conducting. What I'm tired of is music administration. I don't want that. I just want to make music.

My whole life, I've been watching conductors. I was 7 the first time I played with a conductor. Seeing the ones that do it well, it's an amazing thing.

I'm a little less hungry as an actor than I used to be. When you're a director, you're the conductor of the orchestra, and when you're an actor, you're playing the violin. There's a thrill to each of them, but as the conductor, you get the fuller sound.

Composers love to write for symphony orchestras because the symphony is the Rolls Royce of musical instruments.

Some people really want to play Mozart and be just performers. I was more interested in invention.

And, you know, I think the original recording of Ravel's Bolero, probably whoever played percussion on that, will never have It played better than that.

We've been performing with symphonies all of our career and it sounds so wonderful when they play 'My Girl' with the large string section, I want to turn around and look.

If anything, when I was young, I wanted to be an orchestra.

Western classical music is participative. Look at the number of people who are involved in a symphony.

I don't believe in a composer who is only able to compose, who can't play or conduct, can only use a computer. If that trend continues there will be no more symphonies, no more oratorios.

Music has generally involved a lot of awkward contraptions, a certain amount of heavy lifting.

I feel at home in an orchestral score.

I write the music, produce it and the band plays within the parameters that I set.

I can take any series of numbers and turn it into music, from Bach to bebop, Herbie Hancock to hip-hop.

It's a physical challenge. It's a spiritual challenge. I'm studying almost every day a different symphony, not returning to any one for a week.

We can't afford big symphonies but we commission works that sound rich and symphonic because of the nature of the instrumentation and the people we work with.

Paul has more, I think, of a feel for the stage. Whereas I have it more for the notes themselves. I love record making and mixing, arranging, producing. That I love. I love to make beautiful things, but I don't like to perform.

I did a concert... in September with the Berlin Philharmonic... They're great musicians, and there's always something to learn from them.

What I try to impart to a musician is to really try to practice the instrument in a really sincere way. Learn as much about music as you possibly can. Learn composition. Study to try to create compositions of your own and put your own personal touch on your music.

Classical - perhaps I should say 'orchestral' - music is so digital, so cut up, rhythmically, pitchwise and in terms of the roles of the musicians. It's all in little boxes. The reason you get child prodigies in chess, arithmetic, and classical composition is that they are all worlds of discontinuous, parceled-up possibilities.

The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.

I'd like to play for you one of my compositions, my only composition.

In truth, I became a conductor because deep down I wanted to conduct Brahms's four symphonies and Richard Strauss's tone poems.

Conductors' careers are made for the most part with 'Romantic' music. 'Classic' music eliminates the conductor; we do not remember him in it.