A Quote by Nadia Boulanger
[On being asked how it felt to be the first female conductor of the Boston Symphony:] I've been a woman for a little more than fifty years, and I've gotten over my original astonishment.
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I've been a woman for a little over 50 years and have gotten over my initial astonishment. As for conducting an orchestra, that's a job where I don't think sex plays much part.
Anyway, this huge Lena Dunham interview in Playboy. It felt like a shifting, of some kind. This new female archetype - this new, powerful, honest, non-pandering kind of female is becoming more powerful than whatever else has been rocking it for the past 10 years. I heard that Hugh Hefner's daughter is taking over. Which, if a woman is running Playboy, something is right.
There is no reason why a joke should not be appreciated more than once. Imagine how little good music there would be if, for example, a conductor refused to play Beethoven's Fifth Symphony on the ground that his audience might have heard it before.
When one woman was asked how long she had been going to symphony concerts, she paused to calculate and replied, 'Forty-seven years - and I find I mind it less and less.
It's different for people who have not seen a symphony conductor conduct from a chair. I feel very connected to the orchestra in a way that a conductor sometimes does not feel. I think it's more visceral.
It used to be said that, socially speaking, Philadelphia asked who a person is, New York how much is he worth, and Boston what does he know. Nationally it has now become generally recognized that Boston Society has long cared even more than Philadelphia about the first point and has refined the asking of who a person is to the point of demanding to know who he was. Philadelphia asks about a man's parents; Boston wants to know about his grandparents.
A man gets on a train with his little boy, and gives the conductor only one ticket. 'How old's your kid?' the conductor says, and the father says, 'He's four years old.' 'He looks at least twelve to me,' says the conductor. And the father says, 'Can I help it if he worries?
Space travel is the only technology that is more dangerous and more expensive now than it was in its first year. Fifty years after Yuri Gagarin, the space shuttle ended up being more dangerous and more expensive to fly than those first throwaway rockets, even though large portions of it were reusable. It's absurd.
I was born in North London, migrated to Australia when I was four. So when I first came to Australia people saw me as a little English boy. Over the years that feeling of being a little English boy diminished and I felt much more Australian.
On the river path in Boston beauty was most expressed as youth and intelligence. That made sense; sixty degree-giving institutions, some three hundred thousand students; that meant at least one hundred fifty thousand more nubile young women than demographics would ordinarily suggest. Maybe that was why young men stayed in Boston when their college years were over, maybe that explained why they were so intellectually hyperactive, so frustrated, so alcoholic, such terrible drivers.
Now, as a 29-year-old, you're a little bit different than a 26-year-old. But I actually felt really comfortable in Boston. I felt that I was one of the best players in the league at the time. I thought Boston was going to be the home for me for the rest of my career.
I have had much pleasure in working with Orphei Drängar during my time as chief conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, and I consider OD to be one of the most brilliant men´s choirs in the world. The singers are highly professional and their repertoire is of a very wide range, but then they have been trained for years by Eric Ericson, the world´s leading choir conductor. I also admire the strength and the beauty of their voices. OD is an extraordinary powerful choir!
I have been told that a young would-be composer wrote to Mozart asking advice about how to compose a symphony. Mozart responded that a symphony was a complex and demanding form and it would be better to start with something simpler. The young man protested, 'But, Herr Mozart, you wrote symphonies when you were younger than I am now.' Mozart replied, 'I never asked how.
The joker in the deck of lesbian fidelity is female vanity: no woman of fifty is going to undress in front of a woman of twenty no matter how much she might lust for her.
God forbid that Americans earning, say, more than $1 million a year be asked to pony up a little more in taxes to support a larger military at a time when, we are told over and over, the country is in the middle of a war on terror. Millionaires can't be asked to sacrifice even just a little bit. No, they deserve to have their taxes cut while others fight and die.
In the last fifty years science has advanced more than in the 2,000 previous years and given mankind greater powers over the forces of nature than the ancients ascribed to their gods.
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