[Dixielandjazz] Famous Musician's Quotes

[Jerry Gordon]

My sole inspiration is a telephone call from a producer.
- - Cole Porter

Don't bother to look, I've composed that already.
- - Gustav Mahler to Bruno Walter, who had stopped to admire mountain
scenery in rural Austria.

I would rather play "Chiquita Banana" and have my swimming pool than
play Bach and starve.
- - Xavier Cugat

[Musicians] talk of nothing but money and jobs. Give me businessmen
every time. They really are interested in music and art.
- - Jean Sibelius, explaining why he rarely invited musicians to his
home.
The amount of money one needs is terrifying.
- - Ludwig van Beethoven

Only become a musician if there is absolutely no other way you can
make a living.
- - Kirke Mecham, on his life as a composer

I am not handsome, but when women hear me play, they come crawling to
my feet.
- - Niccolo Paganini

Flint must be an extremely wealthy town: I see that each of you bought
two or three seats.
- - Victor Borge, playing to a half-filled house in Flint, Mich.

If one hears bad music it is one's duty to drown it by one's
conversation.
- - Oscar Wilde

Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together.
- - Mel Brooks

Life can't be all bad when for 10 dollars you can buy all the
Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for 10 years.
- - William F. Buckley Jr.

You can't possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh and
go slow.
- - Oscar Levant, explaining his way out of a speeding ticket

Wagner's music is better than it sounds.
- - Mark Twain

I love Beethoven, especially the poems.
- - Ringo Starr

If a young man at the age of 23 can write a symphony like that, in
five years he will be ready to commit murder.
- - Walter Damrosch on Aaron Copland

There are still so many beautiful things to be said in C major.
- - Sergei Prokofiev

I never use a score when conducting my orchestra. Does a lion tamer
enter a cage with a book on how to tame a lion?
- - Dimitri Mitropoulos

God tells me how the music should sound, but you stand in the way.
- - Arturo Toscanini to a trumpet player

"Already too loud!"
- - Bruno Walter at his first rehearsal with an American orchestra, as
the players reached for their instruments

I really don't know whether any place contains more pianists than
Paris, or whether you can find more asses and virtuosos anywhere.
- - Frederic Chopin

When she started to play, Steinway himself came down personally and
rubbed his name off the piano.
- - Bob Hope, on comedienne Phyllis Diller

Never look at the trombones, it only encourages them.
- - Richard Strauss

In opera, there is always too much singing.
- - Claude Debussy

Oh how wonderful, really wonderful, opera would be if there were no
singers!
- - Gioacchino Rossini

Movie music is noise. It's even more painful than my sciatica.
- - Sir Thomas Beecham

I think popular music in this country is one of the few things in the
20th century that has made giant strides in reverse.
- - Bing Crosby

Theirs' (the Beatles') is a happy, cocky, belligerently resourceless
brand of harmonic primitivism . . . In the Liverpudlian repertoire,
the indulged amateurishness of the musical material, though closely
rivaled by the indifference of the performing style, is actually
surpassed only by the ineptitude of the studio production method.
"Strawberry Fields" suggests a chance encounter at a mountain wedding
between Claudio Monteverdi and a jug band.
- - Glenn Gould



Jerry Gordon, Troy, NY - Web master for
http://www.timesunion.com/communities/jazz

If you ever have trouble getting through to my JUNO address, try
ggordon2 at nycap.rr.com