After a concert week (especially one that went as smoothly as this one did) it's nice to enjoy a music related chuckle or two. A special thanks to Nick and Orin for sending these my way.
Actual Instructions from Professional Conductors to the Orchestra While In Rehearsal)
"Please don't use the depth-charge pizzicato."
"Pianissimo doesn't mean 'Drop the fuck out.'"
"Listen to the tune, and then accompany it in a non-disgraceful fashion."
"Let's see if you can pizzicato together in a non-banjo-like way."
"It's very hard to raise money for something that sounds like this."
"You know, there's a fine line between artistry and shit; not that what you're doing is shit, but it's close to it."
"Imagine you're getting enough money for what you do."
"Not so bright. It sounds like 'Orpheus in His Underwear'"
"Play short, especially if you don't know where you are."
"That was a drive-by viola solo."
"Horns, imagine that you've had a really ugly breakfast and it's about to come up."
"There is a lot of fishing for notes. I wish you would catch them."
"Play faster. It's getting late."
"Strings, I know what you're thinking: 'With all this racket going on, why am I playing? Well, there's no time for existential questions right now."
"This must be much more agitated. Think of someone you hate. Think of your mother-in- law."
"The place where you will be shot if you come in early is the bar before 26."
"Now forget all the nasty things I said and play naturally."
"You're all wondering what speed it's going to go. Well, so am I."
"Play as if you were musicians."
QUOTES
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: "I write [music] as a sow pisses."
Cole Porter: My sole inspiration is a telephone call from a producer."
Gustav Mahler to Bruno Walter who had stopped to admire mountain scenery in rural Austria: Don't bother to look, I've composed all this already."
Xavier Cugat: "I would rather play Chiquita Banana and have my swimming pool than play Bach and starve."
Jean Sibelius explaining why he rarely invited musicians to his home: "[Musicians] talk of nothing but money and jobs. Give me businessmen every time. They really are interested in music and art."
Ludwig van Beethoven: "The amount of money one needs is terrifying..."
Kirke Mecham on his life as a composer: "Only become a musician if there is absolutely no other way you can make a living."
Bob Dylan: "Chaos is a friend of mine."
Camille Saint-Saens: "There is nothing more difficult than talking about music."
Nicolo Paganini: "I am not handsome, but when women hear me play, they come crawling to my feet."
Ringo Starr: "Of course I'm ambitious. What's wrong with that? Otherwise you sleep all day."
Nathaniel Hawthorne: "What is the voice of song, when the world lacks the ear of taste?"
Victor Borge, playing to a half-filled house in Flint, Michigan:."Flint must be an extremely wealthy town: I see that each of you bought two or three seats."
Oscar Wilde: If one hears bad music it is one's duty to drown it by one's conversation."
Mel Brooks: "Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together."
William F. Buckley, Jr.: "Life can't be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas and listen to them for ten years."
Oscar Levant, explaining his way out of a speeding ticket: "You can't possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh and go slow.".
Mark Twain: "Wagner's music is better than it sounds."
Ringo Starr: "I love Beethoven, especially the poems."
James Gibbons Hunekar: "Berlioz says nothing in his music, but he says it magnificently."
Walter Damrosch on Aaron Copland: "If a young man at the age of twenty-three can write a symphony like that, in five years he will be ready to commit murder."
Sergei Prokofiev: "There are still so many beautiful things to be said in C major."
Dimitri Mitropolous: "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?"
Arturo Toscanini to a trumpet player: "God tells me how the music should sound, but you stand in the way."
Bruno Walter at his first rehearsal with an American orchestra, on seeing the players reaching for their instruments: "Already too loud!"
Frederic Chopin: "I really don't know whether any place contains more pianists than Paris, or whether you can find more asses and virtuosos anywhere."
Bob Hope, on comedienne Phyllis Diller: "When she started to play, Steinway himself came down personally and rubbed his name off the piano."
Richard Strauss: "Never look at the trombones, it only encourages them."
Claude Debussy: "In opera, there is always too much singing."
Samuel Johnson's definition of opera: "An exotic and irrational entertainment."
Pierre Beaumarchais about The Barber of Seville: "If a thing isn't worth saying, you sing it."
Robert Benchley: "Opera is where a guy gets stabbed in the back and instead of dying, he sings."
Ford Frick: "I'd hate for this to get out, but I really like opera."
Gioachino Rossini: "Oh how wonderful really wonderful opera would be if there were no singers!"
Sir Thomas Beecham: "Movie music is noise. It's even more painful than my sciatica."
Bing Crosby: "I think popular music in this country is one of the few things in the twentieth century that have made giant strides in reverse."
Glenn Gould, speaking of the Beatles: "Theirs is a happy, cocky, belligerently resourceless brand of harmonic primitivism. In the Liverpudlian repertoire, the indulgent 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."
Jerry Garcia: "It's pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness."
Frank Zappa on his rock symphony debuted by the Los Angeles Philharmonic: "A ponderous orchestral absurdity."
Ok, I'll admit it - I am behind on blogging about some of my more random activities of the past few weeks. What can I say? Life got in the way. However, today is a Leap Day - so, suspend disbelief and grant me this opportunity to say a few of the more random things on my mind.
