Ansel Adams Quotes

Music is a living art. You re-create it.

Typography is to literature as musical performance is to composition: an essential act of interpretation, full of endless opportunities for insight or obtuseness.

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

A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.

When you have great songs that are going to live longer than the composers, everything you can do to bring those different elements and nuances out, serve the song.

The role of the musician is to go from concept to full execution. Put another way, it's to go from understanding the content of something to really learning how to communicate it and make sure it's well-received and lives in somebody else.

The real architecture happens within the works themselves, and that was done by the composer. That's where the real skill is. In putting together a program, you're more a curator, but that's important as well. And then the interpreting of it is where our big job is.

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

I don't have favourites, I think, when you play, you have to be like a prostitute, you have to love the piece you are playing. Even if you don't like it, you have to play it as if you would like it. Then you are a good interpreter.

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

Songs suffer at the mercy of the performer.

I think of a piece of music as something that comes alive when it is being performed, and I feel that my role in the transmission of music is to be its best advocate at that moment.

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.

I'm really not a songwriter, so if I hear a song, I feel it and like it, I'll do it. But I'll make it the way I want to hear it.

A great conductor is an alchemical force: someone who can absorb the historical weight of a famous melody, the expectations of an audience, and the mercurial brilliance of a host of musicians, and shape them all to his or her interpretative ends.

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

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.

I think John Williams, him and his team, have been incredible orchestrators. By that, I mean how he chooses which instrument plays which note.

I've always been accused of moving around too much when I play concertos. Sometimes, conductors ask me which of us is leading.

The value of music is to be able to play one note at the right time in the right way.

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

Music is its own language - if you don't speak it, it's hard to say what you're trying to do.

It doesn't necessarily mean at all that the composer plays his own works best.

But the thing that will always occupy me the most is music.

What comprises good performance? The ability through singing or playing to make the ear conscious of the true content and affect of a composition.