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My descendants will manage without my portrait' she smiled. Anyway they'll have plenty of photographs of me. To this our famous conductor replied that a photograph only gives the outward appearance of the person,whereas a painting reveals the inner world.
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Anatoli Rybakov (Heavy Sand)
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Harriet Tubman, born into slavery, her head injured by an overseer when she was fifteen, made her way to freedom alone as a young woman, then become the most famous conductor on the Underground Railroad. She made nineteen dangerous trips back and forth, often disguised, escorting more than three hundred slaves to freedom, always carrying a pistol, telling the fugitives, "You'll be free or die." She expressed her philosophy: "There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive. . .
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Howard Zinn (A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present)
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there is a famous bit of musical apocrypha that has Mravinsky cancelling a concert because he had already achieved the best possible result in the rehearsal.
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Tom Service (Music as Alchemy: Journeys with Great Conductors and their Orchestras)
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You know who we been living with for the past week? We been living with the only man in history who ever took a piece in the ladies’ can of a Boston & Maine train. When the conductor caught him in there with his Winter Carnival date she screamed, ‘He trapped me!’ and that’s how he got his name. This is the famous Trapper John. God, Trapper, I speak for the Duke as well as myself when I say it’s an honor to have you with us. Have a martini, Trapper.
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Richard Hooker (MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors)
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The 90-year-old Pablo Casals, the world-famous cellist/composer/conductor, asked why he still practiced eight hours a day, said, “Because I think I’m beginning to make some progress.
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Bonnie Myotai Treace (Wake Up: How to Practice Zen Buddhism)
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the Chicago Symphony was in a class by itself. Fritz Reiner, the famous Hungarian conductor, was fascinating to watch. He was somewhat stout, hunched over with round shoulders, and his arm and baton movements were tiny—you almost had to look at him with binoculars to see what he was doing. But those tiny movements forced the players to peer at him intently, and then he would suddenly raise his arms up over his head and the entire orchestra would go crazy.
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Philip Glass (Words Without Music: A Memoir)
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I used to sit here on the stoop as a kid and listen to the wind in the trees. It was only a few years ago that I realized this is the one place where it wasn't the wind that I was hearing, it was the trees. The wind was merely the conductor, but the trees were the symphony.
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Viola Shipman (Famous in a Small Town)
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He looked down at the desk, at his notebook resting there with the pen on top. He had never thought of engineering as a way to escape the world; after all, engineers didn't build stories or other worlds.
Or, well, perhaps they did; perhaps, late at night, huddled around the boiler with the driver and the conductor, they told their own stories. Famous robberies in the west, derailments, perhaps even ghost trains or passengers long dead who still prowled the carriages.
Either way, Jack had turned his profession into his escape, which Ellis could respect.
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Sam Starbuck (The Dead Isle)
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Not enough, not enough,” whispered Korovyev, “look to the left at the first violins and give them a nod so that each one of them thinks you’ve recognized him individually. There are only world-famous celebrities here. Nod to that one at the first stand—that’s Vieuxtemps. That’s it, very good. Now on we go!” “Who’s the conductor?” asked Margarita as she flew away. “Johann Strauss!” cried the cat. “And may I be hanged on a liana in the tropical forest if such an orchestra has ever played at any ball! I’m the one who invited it! And take note, not one person fell ill, and not one declined.
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Mikhail Bulgakov (The Master and Margarita)
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As the conductor Leopold Stokowski once famously said, “…a painter paints pictures on canvas, but musicians paint their pictures on silence.
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Christopher Young (On the Periphery: David Sylvian - A Biography: The Solo Years)
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When he was conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, Artur Rodzinski said: “In our orchestra we have many nationalities, types, and temperaments. We have learned to forget individual likes, dislikes, and differences of temperament for the sake of music to which we have dedicated our lives. I often wonder if we could not solve the world’s problems on a similar basis of harmony.” “Think what a single individual in a symphony orchestra can accomplish,” the famous maestro continued, “by giving up his individual traits and ambitions in the service of music…. Suppose that in life you had the same all-embracing love for the whole of mankind and for your neighbor in particular. Only when every one of us and every nation learns the secret of love for all mankind will the world become a great orchestra, following the beat of the Greatest Conductor of all.
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Jonathan Morris (Light in the Darkness: The Teachings of Father James Keller, M.M., and The Christophers)
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As the young husband and wife lay in each other’s arms, each contemplating past, present, and future, Clint recognized the music as the adagietto from Gustav Mahler’s fifth symphony. It was one of the most famous movements in the entire symphonic repertoire, but it was also one of the most debated. Mahler ostensibly composed the adagietto as a love song to his wife, Alma, but when played at the much slower tempo preferred by many conductors, the music instead evokes a feeling of profound melancholy. After almost eighty years, musicologists and aficionados still couldn’t agree whether the music was supposed to be happy or sad, whether it was an expression of intense love and devotion or of unmitigated despair. Clint was struck by the irony that this music would be playing at this moment in his life, and his mouth curled into an ambivalent smile. Was he happy? Was he sad? Would he ever again be certain?
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William T. Prince (The Education of Clint Buchanan (The Clint Buchanan Series #2))
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The Conductor. For days and days afterward, I thought about my aunt’s story about my mother and the safe and the train and her nickname. I wished my mother had told me that story when I was a child, or even when I was an adult. Because I would have loved her if I’d known that in addition to her being my mother and the author of a famous book on John Calvin, she was also the Conductor. But maybe she felt that she couldn’t tell me the story and still be the kind of mother that, it turns out, I didn’t want her to be.
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Brock Clarke (Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe?: A Novel)
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Humor is a vastly underrated tool for relationship and trust-building. Comedian, conductor, and pianist Victor Borge famously stated that “laughter is the shortest distance between two people.” I have absolutely found this to be true in both my personal relationships as well as my coaching relationships.
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Brett Bartholomew (Conscious Coaching: The Art and Science of Building Buy-In)
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But it was his speaking voice that would be famous, first on The Children’s Hour, later as announcer on the Metropolitan Opera Broadcasts. The show was heavily musical, following Cross’s deep interest in classical music and opera. There might be an opening hymn, sung by Audrey Egan; then a poem; then a song from one of the youngest children. “And who is standing here with her ticket ready to pay for a ride on the White Rabbit Bus?” Cross would ask; and a small voice would chirp, “It’s Jeannie Elkins, Mr. Conductor.” Then came another song, and the members of the Peter Pig Club would clamor for a story, which Cross would narrate and the cast act out. Among the notables to emerge from the show were Metropolitan Opera star Rise Stevens and screen actress Ann Blyth. Vivian Smolen, Jackie Kelk, Walter Tetley, and the Halops had distinguished radio careers as adults.
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John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)