A Quote by Henry Mancini

The most immediately gratifying thing about my work is conducting a large orchestra. But the long range payoff is composing because you've written something and it's there forever.
There's a thing about film composing and conducting in my family.
The actor is concerned with his own bit of it, but the director's somehow trying to work the whole thing into a much bigger picture. It's like conducting an orchestra.
The art of conducting consists in knowing when to stop conducting to let the orchestra play.
My fear is you have to be careful as a writer to not get caught up in social media and blogging, because it can start to feed into your writing time. When you are writing a book, it's such a long journey where the payoff is way at the end, sometimes years away. The payoff of the blog post is today. You get the reinforcement, comments or "likes" immediately. It's appealing. You have to be patient with the book.
I always tend to think that composing is not playing an instrument, composing is having something in your head that's steaming and it has to go out. It has to become sounds and be written. It's an emotion that you can't repress.
For me to rehearse with a children's orchestra a Mahler symphony was to really work. We had three or four weeks of rehearsal with the orchestra, every day eight or nine hours, putting the First together. I had been conducting Tchaikovsky a lot and Beethoven, but Mahler was different.
Conducting is a strange thing to teach. There are very few great conducting teachers, and most great conductors don't teach. Look at Valery Gergiev - what he does is not teachable. A lot of it is on-the-job training, what works and what doesn't work.
It's been thrown up to me most of my life: Why don't I just concentrate on conducting or composing or my own playing or on jazz?
In symphonic music, when you are conducting, you do the same thing. You are feeling the whole orchestra, thinking ahead so you can prepare for a change.
I could create music that sounded as strange as any electronic music, because you see, my opinion about electronic music is that the real composer is the guy who invented the instrument. Pressing buttons is not composing. Composing is about creating something.
If people can find something that they love about themselves after going to one of my shows, then I am so addicted to that feeling. It's the most gratifying thing on earth.
I'm very motivated by the occasional creative payoff that comes when something goes really well, be it a song, a recording or performance. The payoff is enormous - when you get it. Most of the time, though, I'm filled with self-loathing and general frustration at the limitations I have as a musician.
There will have to be times when I'm not conducting because I'm composing. I haven't solved that problem, and perhaps I never will.
I feel like people have more in common than the news reports. People getting along doesn't sell very well in the news. I find that to be deeply depressing. I don't even talk about it on stage, because it would take too long to explain. I'd have to spend an hour on it to get people to understand what I'm saying because it's so instantly polarizing. Because cable news has kind of set up a construct where you're for or against something immediately. So if I said something about it, people would be for or against me immediately. And I don't want that.
The next thing to be said about what long-range planning is not, is that it does not deal with future decisions. It deals with the futurity of present decisions. Decisions exist only in the present. The question that faces the long-range planner is not what we should do tomorrow.
And if Henry Higgins is not the most reprehensible character ever written for the stage, that's only because somewhere, somehow, someone is composing a musical biography of Ronald Reagan
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