- I don't want to spend the rest of my life doing as [Arturo Toscanini] did, studying and restudying 50 pieces of music. It would bore me to death. I want to conduct, play the piano, compose.
- [April 1962, remarks to the audience from his remarks to the audience during a concert at which time he publicly disassociated himself from Glenn Gould's interpretation of the Johannes Brahms' D minor piano concerto about to be performed] I have only once before in my life ever had to submit to a soloist's totally new and incompatible view, and that was the last time I accompanied Mr. Gould. But this time, the discrepancies between our views are so great that I feel I must make this small disclaimer.
- Life without music is unthinkable. Music without life is academic. That is why my contact with music is a total embrace.
- Natalie Wood played Maria, the Puerto Rican damsel, in "West Side Story". Natalie lost.
- Elvis Presley is the greatest cultural force in the 20th century. He introduced the beat to everything--music, language, clothes. It's a whole new social revolution--the '60s comes from it.
- [on Ludwig van Beethoven] Form is only an empty word, a shell, without the gift of inevitability; a composer can write a string of perfectly molded sonata-allegro movements, with every rule obeyed, and still suffer from bad form. Beethoven broke all the rules, and turned out pieces of breathtaking rightness. Rightness--that's the word! When you get the feeling that whatever note succeeds the last is is the only possible note that can rightly happen in that instant, that context, then chances are you're listening to Beethoven. Our boy has the real goods, the stuff from Heaven, the power to make you feel at the finish, "Something is right in the world". There is something that checks throughout, that follows its own law consistently--something we can trust, that will never let us down.
- [George Gershwin's] tragedy was not that he failed to cross the tracks, but rather that he did, and once there, in his new habitat, was deprived of the chance to plunge his roots firmly into the new soil. He was given only a little more than a decade to develop the roots of this transplantation and died, shockingly and maddeningly, in his thirties--a few years older than [Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart] was when he died. These two names may be felt to be an uncomfortable pairing, but they make a fascinating comparison. Both men were "naturals", each evolving a body of music that sprang like phenomena of nature from their respective soils, fertile and flourishing. But Mozart had no tracks to cross. His was one great continuing harvest from childhood to death. Gershwin, on the contrary, had to plough, sow, thresh and reap afresh over and over again. We can only speculate about what degree of mastery he might have attained if he had lived.
- [on George Gershwin's "An American in Paris"] When you hear the piece, you rejoice in the first theme, then sit and wait through the "filler" until the next one comes along. In this way you can sit out two-thirds of the composition. The remaining third is marvelous because it consists of the themes themselves. But where's the composition? What's good in it is so good that it's irresistible. If you have to go along with some chaff in order to have the wheat, it's worth it.
- The "Rhapsody in Blue" is not a composition at all. It's a string of several paragraphs stuck together--with a thin paste of flour and water. It is not a real composition in the sense that whatever happens in it must seem inevitable, or even pretty inevitable. You can cut out parts of it without affecting the whole in any way except to make it shorter. You can remove any of these stuck-together sections and the piece still goes on as bravely as before. You can even interchange these sections with one another and no harm done. You can make cuts within a section, or add new cadenzas, or play it with any combination of instruments or on the piano alone. It can be a five-minute piece or a six-minute piece or a 12-minute piece. And, in fact, all these things are being done to it every day. It's still the "Rhapsody in Blue".
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