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"Composers are not all good conductors."
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"Pianists call me a composer, composers call me a pianist. The classicists think me a futurist, and the futurists call me a reactionary."
"Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules... Mathematicians are more like classical composers."
"The Western musical canon came about not merely by accumulation, but by opposition and subversion, both to the ruling powers on whom composers depended for their livelihoods and to other musics."
"Then I started listenin' a lot to classical composers. Piano works. Just to see what they were doin'. That sort of put me in a different groove to try to blend all that in."
Explore more quotes by Anton Seidl
"Musical practice is too young an art in America to warrant a search for men with a conductor's gift."
"America does not need gorgeous halls and concert rooms for its musical development, but music schools with competent teachers, and many, very many, free scholarships for talented young disciples who are unable to pay the expense of study."
"I have often heard the statement made by foreign singers, as a demonstrated fact, that the German artists are artists in feeling indeed, and serious in their devotion, but that their singing is crude."
"It always makes me sad when I think of how I saw Wagner wasting his vitality, not only by singing their parts to some of his artists, but acting out the smallest details, and of how few they were who were responsive to his wishes."
"Conducting! A subject, truly, concerning which much might be written, yet scarcely anything of real importance is to be found in books."
"I learned, too, how it was possible with the help of the picture and action to transform an apparently insignificant violin passage into an incident, and to lift a simple horn call into a thing of stupendous significance by means of scenic emphasis."
"It is simple nonsense to speak of the fixed tempo of any particular vocal phrase. Each voice has its peculiarities."
"The composers could no longer direct all performances in person, and so the responsibility of interpreting their works in the spirit in which they had been conceived was placed upon conductors."
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