A Quote by Richard Strauss
On conducting: If you can just barely hear the French horns on stage, the balance is perfect.
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Singing for stage, if you don't hear yourself, that's when you push, and that's when you can hurt your voice sometimes. So if I can hear myself in my ear, it really helps me to find that balance of how loud I needed to be singing.
Every album is unto itself, so whatever sounds we need to come up with, like way back when, we needed horns. So we invented the Lone Wolf Horns, and we learned how to play horns.
When I was in high school, I took French. I barely passed and didn't learn anything at all. There was a joke among me and my friends in the class that nothing sounded more ridiculous than a guy with a country accent speaking French.
Everything in nature has found a niche, a perfect harmony of balance. Man need to find his niche, his perfect balance, where he fits in the natural cycle
I went to Brown to be a French professor, and I didn't know what I was doing except that I loved French. When I got to Paris and I could speak French, I know how much it helped me to establish relationships with Karl Lagerfeld, with the late Yves St. Laurent. French, it just helps you if you're in fashion. The French people started style.
I'm gonna be a respectable dude. When people talking to me, I'm gonna show everybody respect. I just wanted to do that, I needed some kind of balance and I think that Islam was perfect for me. It ain't nothing different than Christianity, we all believe in Jesus, we all believe in God, it's just that Islam really helped me balance out who I am. Cuz if I can go all day without making Salaat or asking for forgiveness or giving thanks, you know, I would probably be a lunatic. So that's what gave me balance.
You just let your lower self go, and then it takes on all these aspects of the society - the city with horns blowing, the people yelling things at each other, and the all-in-all violence and chaos of the city. Put that on stage with music, and that's what this is.
I just love France, I love French people, I love the French language, I love French food. I love their mentality. I just feel like it's me. I'm very French.
I had no interest or intention of ever writing music. I was a professional violinist in my 20s. I was obsessed with conducting, and I was conducting as much as I could, and I was studying as much as I could. I went to USC; I got an undergrad degree in violin and a master's degree in conducting.
There's a spectrum of possibilities. You can underline the bass, or not at all. You can create something that is well-anchored or that is floating and never arriving. You can make a melodic line dominant or barely visible. The conducting gesture is akin to painting or sculpture.
When I got to college I simply decided that I could speak French, because I just could not spend any more time in French classes. I went ahead and took courses on French literature, some of them even taught in French.
For a long time, I dressed like an idiot. In college, I had a fully shaved head with just two horns. Like, a coxcomb of hair that I would sculpt into two horns. I looked like a crazy person.
I just said let's get some poets on tv. And when they said that sounded unlikely, I made it worse. I said, no man, I want to put a bunch of black poets on stage, too. Some Latino poets who barely speak English and Asian poets who can't believe how discriminated against they are. It was luck nad being in the right place. I wasn't saying nothing somebody else wasn't saying but they wouldn't hear it from them.
It's the ground that we walk on, it's where we sit, it's the language that we use. It's a difficult undertaking, but I think without healing that and creating more of a balance between the sexes, we will never have balance globally. I feel like I am going deeper and deeper into this space where I came from that I barely understood.
I just want people to hear the music the way it's suppose to sound, the way we meant for them to hear it. You sit in the studio all this time and make the music, tweak it, try to get it perfect. They should be able to hear it that way.
I realized very early in life what my abilities and limitations were, and foreign languages was definitely one of my limitations. With strenuous effort, I just barely passed my French class at Harvard so I could graduate.
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