Neil Tennant Quotes

I have ambitions to do a Broadway record one of these days and get in the studio with like, a real orchestra. I'm a big musical theatre geek.

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.

Let me say that I've never thought to conduct because the conductor has to think to the music before the orchestra. And the orchestra comes later. For me, it's terrible.

Jeff Lynne is an arranger, and I think it's probably much easier for him to go ahead and play a part himself than to try to show somebody else what he wants. But it's hard for me to say; I barely know Jeff.

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

A Beethoven symphony should be rehearsed like chamber music, only for a lot more people.

All the conductor has to do is stand back and try not to get in the way. Mozart is doing all the work.

My show business career doesn't mean I can't write a symphony. It just means I was never asked to write one.

Back then, I was an acoustically-oriented artist. Honestly, 'Poetry Man' wouldn't have been my first choice.

A song versus an album is not like a scene versus a play.

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.

With Dream Theater, every creative aspect of the group went through me. I oversaw it all from top to bottom.

There was just one time when the band took a big break, and I did that Nina project in Japan in 1999.

I want to write musicals for my whole life. I always did.

It's easier to collaborate with instrumentalists than singers; they know exactly the sound that I need.

If you look at my history, my history is that of forming bands rather than joining them.

I'm a composer like every maestro on this earth.

I am happy to be a composer.

My mother was an opera singer and my father is a clarinet player, composer and conductor.

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

Because I write the music, I write the lyrics, I write the vocal melody lines - I write everything. Just because I let somebody sing something doesn't mean they're more important than the bass player or the keyboard player or the drummer.

Deciding what is to be sung and what is not to be sung is really what writing a musical is about.

I'm very eclectic in what I like and what I listen to. But my favorite musical ever is "The Sound of Music." That was actually one that inspired me to sing.

Kids talk to me and say they want to do musicals again because they've studied the tapes of the old films. We didn't have that. We thought once we had made it, even on film, it was gone except for the archives.

I'd love to do a musical actually. My background is in music. I have a bachelors in music. I thought that I was going to be a composer, long ago when I first started. So it was amazingly fun to do those two routines in the film.