Leo Kottke Quotes

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

There are some people, by the way, that associate a certain amount of visualization with the performance of music. Those are people that really are not centrally concerned only with music, the traditional things.

My music wouldn't sound the way it does if I hadn't had the experience of conducting.

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

I don't know what really makes a great musical or not. In the end, you write it, and you write it because you want to write it.

That's all I ever do, just try and do the best I can and cater to the song, cater to the music.

Musicians are also interpretive artists and we are just as creative as painters and writers. We interpret in a way that expresses ourselves.

I feel my live shows are my music; everything blossoms from the live shows.

I'm not a natural songwriter.

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?

That's what it is that you rehearse - the making of music, not the playing of notes as abstractions.

I do love to sing. Had I a longer set of thigh bones and a sweeter voice, I should have loved to be a performer.

I'm an intuitive musician. I have no real technical skills. I can only play six chords on the guitar.

Very often, if I know the orchestra doesn't know a piece or it's a new piece, I have main ideas about it. But then we start to play and I never talk about places where they played so beautiful and so clear in the beginning that there is nothing to say.

I've just simply used what I've used because of the great, great expressive potential of it.

I just happened to start playing music for the conceptual ideas.

I'm interested in directing attention and focus, explored through playing cello.

I've always thought that the act of playing the guitar was the act of trying to make a point of playing the guitar.

I feel like I'm a secondary artist, a kind of a conduit for the writer, and if it's a good writer, then I have a great road map.

For me making music is part social, part interaction, part collaboration.

Opera is musical theatre, and the music can teach you so much about the theatre. Very often I use musical terms to think about how I comport myself on stage: I employ 'rubati,' 'ostinati,' 'cadenze.' Finding these parallels is very fascinating for me.

Performing written music, even when I've written it, is not very interesting to me.

Songs suffer at the mercy of the performer.

The relation between practical and spiritual spheres in music is obvious, if only because it demands ears, finger, consciousness and intellect.

I think musically.