Tod Machover Quotes

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, 'Is there a meaning to music?' My answer would be, 'Yes.' And 'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?' My answer to that would be, 'No.'

It's better for the listener to interpret their own meanings to the music.

Nobody talks about music as having intrinsic meaning, how it engages the mind.

I think the whole question of meaning in music is difficult enough even if you hear me playing live right now in the same room! What I mean and what you take from it may be two quite different things anyway.

My scratching I don't really think communicates to intelligent life forms. Anyone with more than one brain cell would think Kid Koala music is completely retarded.

He was making all kinds of sounds apparently with his mouth, and shaking his head and I thought, gosh, is he trying to stop the orchestra? Is it all wrong? It was just unbelievable.

I conceived of an instrument that would create sound without using any mechanical energy, like the conductor of an orchestra. The orchestra plays mechanically, using mechanical energy; the conductor just moves his hands, and his movements have an effect on the music artistry.

I do basically what a conductor does with a baton, except I also play along with the orchestra. So I have to juggle the roles of playing the concertmaster; sometimes I drop the violin and wave my arms.

I think it's always interesting how music means different things to different people, and people who overthink it are looking to in some ways show off with music, versus people who just respond to a song and decide to sing it.

Everyone's just extracting meaning and feeling and emotion from almost every aspect of music, and I think that for me, it's a huge antidote to that to have a concept album.

I approach everything as chamber music. Even with Beethoven symphonies, I lead from the violin and basically encourage the orchestra to think of it as a giant string quartet.

And to understand this, I think this is a most important point where I would like always to be understood what we do with the New York Philharmonic. That the meaning of the music is number one.

I was different from most young conductors today.

I feel that for years of teaching in the country and reading criticism in books, I feel like the things most needed in our culture are the understanding of the meanings of our music. We haven't done that good of job teaching our kids what our music means or how we developed our taste in music that reminds us and teaches us who we are.

Music, of almost any kind, always made sense to me.

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

There are two types of conductors. One is the good conductor who can do passionate music but also listen to the singers and do the orchestra. And then there are great conductors, who have their own opinion on the music, who are ruling everything - and not listening much to the singers, but the orchestra play amazingly.

In symphonic music, when you are conducting, you do the same thing. You are feeling the whole orchestra, thinking ahead so you can prepare for a change.

I mean, the great secret is that an orchestra can actually play without a conductor at all. Of course, a great conductor will have a concept and will help them play together and unify them.

I think it's a very important collaboration between the conductor and the orchestra - especially when the conductor is one more member of the orchestra in the way that you are leading, but also respecting, feeling and building the same way for all the players to understand the music.

I admire Tom Ades: he's a brilliant conductor, and he gets just the right hard, brilliant sound from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra for Russian music.

People often complain that music is too ambiguous, that what they should think when they hear it is so unclear, whereas everyone understands words. With me, it is exactly the opposite, and not only with regard to an entire speech but also with individual words.

The hardest of all the arts to speak of is music, because music has no meaning to speak of.

I like to create the music I hear in my interior. As a conductor, you have the ability to squeeze the sounds and interpretation you asked for from 50 to 80 people.

To look for some kind of insight or meaning in pop songs is not really - well there's plenty of other places where you should probably look first before you start looking for it in a pop song. I guess it was just because I was really into music as a child, and I wanted it to say more. It was the thing, wasn't it? And now it isn't.