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"And what classical music does best and must always do more, is to show this kind of transformation of moods, to show a very wide psychological voyage. And I think that's something that we as classical musicians have underestimated."
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"I think I first realized I wanted to be in country music and be an artist when I was 10. And I started dragging my parents to festivals, and fairs, and karaoke contests, and I did that for about a year before I came to Nashville for the first time. I was 11 and I had this demo CD of me singing Dixie Chicks and Leanne Rimes songs."

"Music when healthy, is the teacher of perfect order, and when depraved, the teacher of perfect disorder."

"A friend of mine, that I had known for some time, came up one day with an old guitar. I don't know where he got it, I don't know how long he'd had it, but he knew about two chords on it. He proceeded to teach them to me, and then we proceeded to go crazy over music."

"I want to do a musical movie. Like Evita, but with good music."

"I am pretty detached from the local music crowd though."

"I was just going more for what I've always been influenced by, European music."
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"They are representations of many shared hours of collaboration between us all. That's the real nature of the relationship the orchestra and I are trying to build."

"And at the same time, you are of course a performer, but it's very important that you understand that your role as a performer is to get the best performance from those wonderful colleagues that you have the chance to work with."

"It's kind of scary sometimes, I've seen this a lot in Asia. Children are given music lessons, very intensively I might add and involving great technical expertise sometimes, but you can tell that they have been told only to play happy pleasant music."

"But those musics do not address the larger kind of architecture in time that classical music does, whatever each one of us knows that classical music must mean."

"But without the experience of actually singing or playing these things yourself, you don't have the same kind of involvement or understanding of what these musical moves mean. And that is a very big problem in addressing the future of music."

"Being a conductor is kind of a hybrid profession because most fundamentally, it is being someone who is a coach, a trainer, an editor, a director."

"But you know in the contemporary art world, you pose a very interesting conundrum. All sorts of people collect very contemporary art, yet when it comes to the music which is analogous to that sort of art, they are not interested, or perhaps even hostile."

"I think music needs to be presented in a way so that kids can grasp songs, dances, simple music that's associated with some particular defining moment in human experience."
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