Orchestra Conductor Quotes

What if . . . what if . . . "What if it's a harvest camp after all?" says Emby. Connor doesn't tell him to shut up this time, because he's thinking the same thing. It's Diego who answers him. "If it is, then I want my fin gers to go to a sculptor. So he can use them to craft something that will last forever." They all think about that. Hayden is the next to speak. "If I'm unwound," says Hayden, "I want my eyes to go to a photographer — one who shoots supermodels. That's what I want these eyes to see." "My lips'll go to a rock star," says Connor. "These legs are definitely going to the Olympics." "My ears to an orchestra conductor." "My stomach to a food critic." "My biceps to a body builder." "I wouldn't wish my sinuses on anybody." And they're all laughing as the plane touches down.

The symphony orchestra had played poorly, so the conductor was in a bad mood. That night he beat his wife--because the music hadn't been beautiful enough.

If you think of human emotions as music, then mine were like an orchestra with no conductor.

Once a reading of a book is under way, and we sink into the experience, a performance of a sort begins... We perform a book-we perform a reading of a book. We perform a book, and we attend the performance. (As readers, we are both the conductor and the orchestra, as well as the audience.)

One of the marks of a godly woman is that she takes responsibility for her soul's need for joy and delight. A woman is a conductor, who leads the orchestra of her surroundings in the songs and music of her life. God is a God of creativity and dimension, and so He is pleased when we we co-create beauty in our own realm, through the power of His Spirit. It was a profound realization when I understood that I could become an artist with my very life.

That smell mixed with the scent of getting tied up and fucked became the smell of complete release, of an orchestra connected by the simple movements of a skilled conductor.

The teacher should be like the conductor in the orchestra, not the trainer in the circus.

Knowledge is the orchestra, understanding is the conductor, wisdom is the symphony.

The players are connected. Each player, interpreting the music individually, constantly modulates and is modulated by the others. There is no final or “master” interpretation; the music is collectively created, and every performance is unique. This is Edelman’s picture of the brain, as an orchestra, an ensemble, but without a conductor, an orchestra which makes its own music.

The conductor of the orchestra doesn’t make a sound. His power comes from awakening possibility in others. —Benjamin Zander, conductor and coauthor of The Art of Possibility

We are the conductors of the beauty of the orchestra of our inner lives. Keep a Händel on it and don't hold Bach!

The novelist is like the conductor of an orchestra, his back to the audience, his face invisible, summoning the experience of music for the people he cannot see. The writer as conductor also gets to compose the music and play all of the instruments, a task less formidable than it seems.

Once the screenplay is finished, I'd just as soon not make the film at all ... I have a strongly visual mind. I visualise a picture right down to the final cuts. I write all this out in the greatest detail in the script, and then I don't look at the script while I'm shooting. I know it off by heart, just as an orchestra conductor needs not look at the score ... When you finish the script, the film is perfect. But in shooting it you lose perhaps 40 percent of your original conception

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.

The house lights go off and the footlights come on. Even the chattiest stop chattering as they wait in darkness for the curtain to rise. In the orchestra pit, the violin bows are poised. The conductor has raised his baton. In the silence of a midwinter dusk, there is far off in the deeps of it somewhere a sound so faint that for all you can tell it may be only the sound of the silence itself. You hold your breath to listen. You walk up the steps to the front door. The empty windows at either side of it tell you nothing, or almost nothing. For a second you catch a whiff of some fragrance that reminds you of a place you’ve never been and a time you have no words for. You are aware of the beating of your heart…The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens. Advent is the name of that moment.

He raised his hands and, guided by a redeeming impulse of truth-like a conductor leading his orchestra in a grand symphony-finally set fingers to keyboard and let the melody of his story dance across the screen

His sexual movements were smoother than warm butter, creative, musical, and right away he became a conductor who directed the performance and moans of his one-woman orchestra with his dick. I sang like a choir.

When people read, they hear voices and see images in their head. This production is total synesthesia and something close to madness. A great book is an hallucinated IMAX film for one. The author had a feeling, which he turned into words, and the reader gets a feeling from those words—maybe it’s the same feeling; maybe it’s not. As Peter Mendelsund wrote in What We See When We Read, a book is a coproduction. A reader both performs the book and attends the performance. She is conductor, orchestra, and audience. A book, whether nonfiction of fiction, is an “invitation to daydream.

Ivy felt as if she’d been touched by magic. Her eyes caught the glances of other musicians. And it was clear they felt it, too. Who can explain it? Who can tell you why? Fools give you reasons, Wise men never try. Some enchanted evening… Tonight, there was brilliance in the hall, a communion of spirits, as if Ivy and the conductor and the pianist and the orchestra and everyone in the audience were one, breathing in and out to the same tempo, feeling one another’s strength and vision, filling with beauty and light, glowing beneath the same stars… …and connected by the same silken thread.

The system that aims at educating our boys and girls in the same manner as in the circus where the trainer teaches the lion to sit on a stool, has not understood the true meaning of education itself. Instead of being like a circus where the trainer uses his stick to make animals do stunts to serve the interest of the audience, the system of education should be like an Orchestra where the conductor waves his stick to orchestrate the music already within the musicians’ heart in the most beautiful manner. The teacher should be like the conductor in the orchestra, not the trainer in the circus.

You were very serious,” her grandmother continued. “You had these big brown eyes and you were always going, ‘What’s that? What’s that?’ You wondered what everything was. You would frown and point a lot, like a conductor looking for your orchestra. You always seemed very busy, like you were between appointments all the time, but you were just a little child.

Gioacchino Rossini, the composer of William Tell and many other operas, had a good grasp of the relationship between music and food: “What love is to the heart, appetite is to the stomach. The stomach is the conductor that leads and livens up the great orchestra of our emotions.” If

We humans like to make out we’re in charge of things even when we’re not. A good example is an orchestra conductor. Would the orchestra really not know what to do without the fella waving that stick about? It wouldn’t be so bad if he played the maracas or tambourine whilst he waved the stick but he does nothing. If he got hit by a bus on the way to the gig, would it all have to be cancelled because he wasn’t there? There’s a band called Polyphonic Spree that has over twenty members and they ain’t got a conductor. He’s as unnecessary as the bloke who wears white gloves on the national lottery programme.

They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting. At this moment, all over the world—and most recently in America—the conductors standing in front of this human orchestra have only the meanest and most banal melodies in mind.

A dean is the conductor of an orchestra made up entirely of composers.

(Schoenberg himself, however, had no time for Adorno, complaining of his ‘pomposity’ and ‘oily pathos’,

What love is to the heart, appetite is to the stomach. The stomach is the conductor that leads and livens up the great orchestra of our emotions.

Our mind the conductor to life’s orchestra, conduct your mind to illustrate living a wonderful life, fill it with the sounds of joy, laughter and appreciation.

Product managers are like the conductor in an orchestra. The conductor never makes a sound but is responsible for making the orchestra as a whole sound awesome to deliver a great performance to the audience.

When Isaiah was in his teens, he worked for Harry Haldeman and wondered even then how the man could stay in a state of perpetual indignation; his fierce dark eyes glaring through the Coke-bottle bifocals resting on his great beak of a nose, his snow-white hair sticking up like a toilet brush. Isaiah thought he looked like an orchestra conductor. Harry’s wife, Louise, said he looked like an eagle wearing glasses. “Pit

Edelman, who once planned to be a concert violinist, uses musical metaphors as well. In a BBC radio interview, he said: Think: if you had a hundred thousand wires randomly connecting four string quartet players and that, even though they weren’t speaking words, signals were going back and forth in all kinds of hidden ways [as you usually get them by the subtle nonverbal interactions between the players] that make the whole set of sounds a unified ensemble. That’s how the maps of the brain work by reentry. The players are connected. Each player, interpreting the music individually, constantly modulates and is modulated by the others. There is no final or “master” interpretation; the music is collectively created, and every performance is unique. This is Edelman’s picture of the brain, as an orchestra, an ensemble, but without a conductor, an orchestra which makes its own music.

The Prince stood beside the timpanist to count his rests for him and see that he came in in the right place. I suppressed all the trumpet passages which were clearly beyond the players' grasp. The solitary trombone was left to his own devices; but as he wisely confined himself to the notes with which he was thoroughly familiar, such as A flat, D and F, and was careful to avoid all others, his success in the role was almost entirely a silent one.

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.

The best conductors work in such a way that the orchestra doesn’t understand why it plays how it does – they just have no room to think about what they are doing. The process is almost a little bit mystical: you just – you are emotionally involved, and you know, it just happens.

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.

The two strangers got to the waffle station at exactly the same time. (I swear I’m like an award-winning orchestra conductor sometimes.) Cara poured a ladleful of regular batter onto her machine, while Sammy poured her own ladle and grabbed the container of chocolate chips. Wait for it . . . Wait for it . . . “Shit!” Sammy stared at the mountain of chocolate now piled up on the batter. The cap of the container had come off completely and rolled along the floor right into Cara’s feet. “Oh my god, let me help you!” Cara sprung to action, as I knew she would, grabbing a broom and dustpan that I’d placed nearby and cleaning up the chips on the floor. “Oh, you don’t have to,” Sammy stammered. “I’m sorry—I don’t know how that happened.” Cara swept the chips into the dustpan and surveyed Sammy’s half-cooked waffle, which was now completely coated in messy, gooey chocolate. “I mean, I love chocolate as much as the next girl, but even that’s a little much for me.” Sammy laughed, then fiddled with the container in her hand. “I think some dick unscrewed the top so they’d all fall out.” She rolled her eyes. “College boys.” (Or metaphysical entities. Either one.) “Wow, what an asshole,” Cara said. “People are such idiots.

Instead of being like a circus where the trainer uses his stick to make animals do stunts to serve the interest of the audience, the system of education should be like an Orchestra where the conductor waves his stick to orchestrate the music already within the musicians’ heart in the most beautiful manner. The teacher should be like the conductor in the orchestra, not the trainer in the circus.

Stories work on multiple evolved systems in the brain and a skilled storyteller activates these networks like the conductor of an orchestra, a little trill of moral outrage here, a fanfare of status play over there, a tintinnabulation of tribal identification, a rumble of threatening antagonism, a tantara of wit, a parp of sexual allure, a crescendo of unfair trouble, a warping and wefting hum as the dramatic question is posed and reposed in new and interesting ways – all instruments by which masses of brains can be captivated and manipulated.

Fresh proof of the risks you run in writing about players, and of the advisability of not standing to leeward of their self-esteem when one has had the misfortune to wound it in the slightest degree. When you criticize a singer, you do not have his colleagues up in arms against you. Indeed, they generally feel that you have not been severe enough. But the virtuoso instrumentalist who belongs to a well-known musical organization always claims that in criticizing him you are 'insulting' the whole institution, and though the contention is absurd he sometimes succeeds in making the other players believe it.

counterintuitive notion that to best realise your musical intentions as a conductor, you have to set the frame of how the players work together – and then get out of the way. ‘That’s the hard thing,’ Rattle says, ‘that you have to learn to allow them to listen, and that means being less rather than more precise in your gestures.’ Just as the players infused themselves with Thomas Adès’s music, this is a process that comes from the ground up, from the roots of the music they’re playing, rather than being imposed on them by a stick-wielding technocrat. It’s a process that explains why the Berlin Philharmonic does not have a reputation as the most precise orchestra in the world. Rattle admits:

Daniel Levitin is one of the world’s leading experts on how music influences the brain. He would be appearing with the conductor Edwin Outwater and the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Orchestra, which would play Beethoven. Levitin would explain how the music was affecting the audience’s collective brain. Levitin was no disinterested academic. He had had a serious career as a musician, performing with Sting, Mel Tormé, and Blue Öyster Cult, consulting with Stevie Wonder and Steely Dan, and having been recording engineer for Santana and the Grateful Dead. Then he—like Kahn—made a big switch and become a research psychologist, investigating how music interacts with the brain. He was now head of McGill University’s Laboratory for Musical Perception, Cognition and Expertise and author of This Is Your Brain on Music.

Because we don't know, do we? Everyone knows . . . How what happens the way it does? What underlies the anarchy of the train of events, the uncertainties, the mishaps, the disunity, the shocking irregularities that define human affairs? Nobody knows, Professor Roux. "Everyone knows" is the invocation of the cliche and the beginning of the banalization of experience, and it's the solemnity and the sense of authority that people have in voicing the cliché that's so insufferable. What we know is that, in an unclichéd way, nobody knows anything. You can't know anything. The things you know you don't know. Intention? Motive? Consequence? Meaning? All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing. As the audience filed back in, I began, cartoonishly, to envisage the fatal malady that, without anyone's recognizing it, was working away inside us, within each and every one of us: to visualize the blood vessels occluding under the baseball caps, the malignancies growing beneath the permed white hair, the organs misfiring, atrophying, shutting down, the hundreds of billions of murderous cells surreptitiously marching this entire audience toward the improbable disaster ahead. I couldn't stop myself. The stupendous decimation that is death sweeping us all away. Orchestra, audience, conductor, technicians, swallows, wrens—think of the numbers for Tanglewood alone just between now and the year 4000. Then multiply that times everything. The ceaseless perishing. What an idea! What maniac conceived it? And yet what a lovely day it is today, a gift of a day, a perfect day lacking nothing in a Massachusetts vacation spot that is itself as harmless and pretty as any on earth.

People who believe in fundamental and irreversible changes in human nature are themselves ahistorical and naive. If novelists know anything it’s that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities. They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting. At this moment, all over the world — and most recently in America — the conductors standing in front of this human orchestra have only the meanest and most banal melodies in mind. Here in Germany you will remember these martial songs; they are not a very distant memory. But there is no place on earth where they have not been played at one time or another. Those of us who remember, too, a finer music must try now to play it, and encourage others, if we can, to sing along.

Let me try to explain it this way. During a performance, it is the conductor who keeps things together, sees that the singers maintain the right tempi, that the orchestra supports them, that the entrances are on time, that neither is allowed to get away from the other. And he must also see that the orchestra’s playing doesn’t get too loud, that the crescendi build and are dramatic but, at the same time, don’t drown out the singers. When a conductor hears this happening, he can quiet them with a flick of his hand or a finger to the mouth.’ To illustrate, the musician demonstrated the gestures that Brunetti had seen performed during many concerts and operas. ‘And he must, at every moment, be in charge of everything: chorus, singers, orchestra, keeping them in balance perfectly. If he doesn’t do this, then the whole thing falls apart, and all anyone hears is the separate parts, not the whole opera as a unit.

She had heard about telekinetic phenomena. Where she had heard about it she didn't know, but she knew telekinesis was the ability to move objects by thinking about them. She felt thrilled with the possibilities of her newfound power. She wondered if she could move larger things, too. She glanced at the Dumpster, narrowed her eyes in concentration, and strained. The side of the Dumpster buckled with a sharp pop. She gasped. Could she bend objects, too? A noise like rattling chains startled her, and she peered back down the alley. Justin and Mason were shaking the double gate in the fence as if they were trying to break the chain lock. She turned back to the trash piled at the dead end and raised her hands like a great conductor of an orchestra. Soon lettuce leaves, orange peels, coffee grounds, and papers were flying everywhere. With a flick of her wrists, the garbage bounced away from her, heading for Justin and Mason.

As a conductor of orchestras, Ozawa is quite naturally in touch with a large number of people on a daily basis and has to act as the guiding member of a team. But no matter how talented he might be, people would not follow him if he were constantly moody and difficult. Interpersonal relations take on a great significance. A conductor needs like-minded musical colleagues, and he is often called upon to perform social and even entrepreneurial tasks. He has to give much thought to his audiences. And as a musician, he has to devote a good deal of energy to the guidance of the next generation. By contrast, as a novelist I am free to spend my life hardly seeing or talking to anyone for days at a time, and never appearing in the media. I rarely have to do anything that involves teamwork, and while it’s best to have some colleagues, I don’t especially need any. I just have to stay in the house and write—alone. The thought of guiding the next generation has never crossed my mind, I’m sorry to say (not that anyone has ever asked me to do such a thing).

symphony isn’t what you’re going for. Leave the conductor and the sheet music behind. Build a jazz band instead. Jazz emphasizes individual spontaneity. The musicians know the overall structure of the song but have the freedom to improvise, riffing off one another other, creating incredible music. Of course, you can’t just remove the rules and processes, tell your team to be a jazz band, and expect it to be so. Without the right conditions, chaos will ensue. But now, after reading this book, you have a map. Once you begin to hear the music, keep focused. Culture isn’t something you can build up and then ignore. At Netflix, we are constantly debating our culture and expecting it will continually evolve. To build a team that is innovative, fast, and flexible, keep things a little bit loose. Welcome constant change. Operate a little closer toward the edge of chaos. Don’t provide a musical score and build a symphonic orchestra. Work on creating those jazz conditions and hire the type of employees who long to be part of an improvisational band. When it all comes together, the music is beautiful.

She pulled her small Ray-Ban sunglasses partway out of her shoulder bag and took three thousand-yen bills from her wallet. Handing the bills to the driver, she said, 'I'll get out here. I really can't be late for this appointment.' The driver nodded and took the money. 'Would you like a receipt?' 'No need. And keep the change.' 'Thanks very much,' he said. 'Be careful, it looks windy out there. Don't slip.' 'I'll be careful,' Aomame said. 'And also,' the driver said, facing the mirror, 'please remember: things are not what they seem.' Things are not what they seem, Aomame repeated mentally. 'What do you mean by that?' she asked with knitted brows. The driver chose his words carefully: 'It's just that you're about to do something out of the ordinary. Am I right? People do not ordinarily climb down the emergency stairs of the Metropolitan Expressway in the middle of the day - especially women.' 'I suppose you're right.' 'Right. And after you do something like that, the everyday look of things might seem to change a little. Things may look different to you than they did before. I've had that experience myself. But don't let appearances fool you. There's always only one reality.' Aomame thought about what he was saying, and in the course of her thinking, the Janáček ended and the audience broke into immediate applause. This was obviously a live recording. The applause was long and enthusiastic. There were even occasionally calls of 'Bravo!' She imagined the smiling conductor bowing repeatedly to the standing audience. He would then raise his head, raise his arms, shake hands with the concertmaster, turn away from the audience, raise his arms again in praise of the orchestra, face front, and take another deep bow. As she listened to the long recorded applause, it sounded less like applause and more like an endless Martian sandstorm. 'There is always, as I said, only one reality,' the driver repeated slowly, as if underlining an important passage in a book.

As the conductor played her A, I strained to listen to my cello’s A. I could hear that it was off—my ear was that good—but I wasn’t sure if I was too high or too low. I suddenly remembered a trick that

We have all become conductors of an immense orchestra whose players and instruments are scattered about the globe.

Working with living creatures, both plant and animal, is what makes agriculture different from any other production enterprise. Even though a product is produced, in farming the process is anything but industrial. It is biological. We are dealing with a vital, living system rather than an inert manufacturing process. The skills required to manage a biological system are similar to those of the conductor of an orchestra. The musicians are all very good at what they do individually. The role of the conductor is not to play each instrument, but rather to nurture the union of the disparate parts. The conductor coordinates each musician's effort with those of all the others and combines them in a harmonious whole. Agriculture cannot be an industrial process any more than music can be.

BEETHOVEN should by no means be offered as a model for directors of orchestras. The performers under him were obliged cautiously to avoid being led astray by their conductor, who thought only of his composition, and constantly laboured to depict the exact expression required by the most varied gesticulations. Thus, when the passage was loud, he often beat time downwards, when his hand should have been up. A diminuendo he was in the habit of making by contracting his person, making himself smaller and smaller; and when a pianissimo occurred, he seemed to slink, if the word is allowable, beneath the conductor's desk. As the sounds increased in loudness, so did he gradually rise up, as if out of an abyss; and when the full force of the united instruments broke upon the ear, raising himself on tiptoe, he looked of gigantic stature, and, with both his arms floating about in undulating motion, seemed as if he would soar to the clouds. He was all motion, no part of him remained inactive, and the entire man could only be compared to a perpetuum mobile. When his deafness increased, it was productive of frequent mischief, for the maestro's hand went up when it ought to have descended. He contrived to set himself right again most easily in the piano passages, but of the most powerful fortes he could make nothing. In many cases, however, his eye afforded him assistance, for he watched the movements of the bows, and, thus discovering what was going on, soon corrected himself.

Some officers seem to love having all the answers and micromanaging everyone around them. This may give them a sense of power, or perhaps it is a matter of feeding the ego. However, observe that the conductor of a symphony orchestra doesn’t play all the instruments but enables others to work together to perform a great selection of music. We too need many others to play their parts for the ministry of the Army to be successful.

Chinese is a tonal language. Words spelled the same way mean different things when pronounced with one of the four different tones: the 1st stays level, the 2nd rises, the 3rd sinks and then rises, and the 4th falls. For example, the sentence “ma [1st] ma [4th] ma [3rd] ma [1st]?” means “Did mother curse the horse?” First-year Chinese students either use their heads or their index fingers to try to get the tones right: half the class looks like bobblehead dolls, the other like conductors of a Lilliputian orchestra. “Where?

Hello to you too, sunshine.” Pulling a book out of my bag, I cracked it open and settled into my time-toignore- Grayson pose. A pose that took me weeks to perfect. “Let’s not pretend we enjoy each other’s company.” “Don’t you get sick of always being…” He waved his hand back and forth in my direction like a conductor guiding an orchestra. “You?” “What’s that supposed to mean?” “Just that if the stick in your ass got any higher we could hang a flag over your head and declare you your own state.

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.

When the conductor Simon Rattle left the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra to take over the Berlin Philharmonic in 2001, he was released from the usual circumspection incumbent upon those in receipt of Arts Council funds: ‘Shame on the Arts Council for knowing so little, for being such amateurs, for simply turning up with a different group of people every few years with no expertise, no knowledge of history, to whom you have to explain everything, where it came from and why it is there, who don’t listen and who don’t care. Shame on them!’35

Something wrong with short men, is there?” Roger inquired. “They tend to turn mean if they don’t get their way,” Claire answered. “Like small yapping dogs. Cute and fluffy, but cross them and you’re likely to get a nasty nip in the ankle.” Roger laughed. “This observation is the result of years of experience, I take it?” “Oh, yes.” She nodded, glancing up at him. “I’ve never met an orchestra conductor over five feet tall. Vicious specimens, practically all of them. But tall men”—her lips curved slightly as she surveyed his six-feet-three-inch frame—“tall men are almost always very sweet and gentle.” “Sweet, eh?” said Roger, with a cynical glance at the barman, who was cutting up a jellied eel for Brianna. Her face expressed a wary distaste, but she leaned forward, wrinkling her nose as she took the bite offered on a fork. “With women,” Claire amplified. “I’ve always thought it’s because they realize that they don’t have anything to prove; when it’s perfectly obvious that they can do anything they like whether you want them to or not, they don’t need to try to prove it.” “While a short man—” Roger prompted. “While a short one knows he can’t do anything unless you let him, and the knowledge drives him mad, so he’s always trying something on, just to prove he can.

The people who ask me about the “failure of multiculturalism” mean to suggest that not only has a political ideology failed but that human beings themselves have changed and are now fundamentally incapable of living peacefully together despite their many differences. In this argument it is the writer who is meant to be the naive child, but I maintain that people who believe in fundamental and irreversible changes in human nature are themselves ahistorical and naive. If novelists know anything it’s that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities. They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting. At this moment, all over the world—and most recently in America—the conductors standing in front of this human orchestra have only the meanest and most banal melodies in mind. Here in Germany you will remember these martial songs; they are not a very distant memory. But there is no place on earth where they have not been played at one time or another. Those of us who remember, too, a finer music must try now to play it, and encourage others, if we can, to sing along.

Knowing how much friction is needed and when to apply it is the skill that successful leaders, from the coach of a competitive basketball team to the conductor of an orchestra, must master.

The nonconscious mind is responsible for somewhere between 90–99 percent of your mind’s activity.13 For example, out of the 10 million bits per second processed through the eye, only a maximum of 50 bits per second are processed consciously.14 The nonconscious mind operates twenty-four hours a day, at fantastic speeds, about a quintillion (1018) bits per second at a synaptic level and an octillion (1027) bits per second at a microtubular level, for the whole brain.15 Indeed, the mind is truly magnificent. It is the orchestra conductor,

The tape had not been rewound fully and the room filled immediately with music. Lauren Adler, celebrated cello soloist and Elodie’s mother, was in close-up on the screen. She hadn’t started yet, but was embracing the cello, its neck entwined with her own as the orchestra played behind her. She was very young in this video. Her chin was lifted, her eyes fixed on the conductor; long hair cascaded over her shoulders and down her back. She was waiting. The stage lights illuminated one side of her face, throwing the other into dramatic shadow. She was wearing a black satin dress with spaghetti straps, and her fine arms—deceptively strong—were bare. She wore no jewelry except for her simple gold wedding band; her fingers, resting on the strings, were poised, ready. The conductor was on-screen now, a man in a white bowtie and black jacket. He brought the orchestra to a pause and, after a few seconds of silence, nodded at Lauren Adler. She drew breath and then she and her cello began their dance. Amongst

Suppose a musician in an orchestra freely strikes a sour note. The conductor is competent, the music is correctly scored and easy to play, but the musician still exercises his freedom by introducing a discord which immediately passes out into space. The director can do one of two things: he can either order the selection to be replayed, or he can ignore the discord. Fundamentally, it makes no difference which he does, for that false note is traveling out into space at the rate of more than a thousand feet per second; and as long as time endures, there will be discord in the universe.

Though you may think of yourself as the conductor of the orchestra that is your life, you are more like the orchestra itself, a myriad of musicians coming together to create a single symphony.

They talk with their hands, a gesture for every syllable, conductors guiding their conversation like an orchestra.

The players are connected. Each player, interpreting the music individually, constantly modulates and is modulated by the others. There is no final or “master” interpretation; the music is collectively created, and every performance is unique. This is Edelman’s picture of the brain, as an orchestra, an ensemble, but without a conductor, an orchestra which makes its own music. —

In the symphonic world, musically inclined industrialists and financiers were having problems of a different sort with the New York Philharmonic. The old German cooperative presented only half a dozen concerts each year. As the orchestra couldn’t guarantee members full time work, they spent most of their time playing at balls and dances; hence their performances were less than highly polished, though much improved after Theodore Thomas was taken on as conductor. Neither their less than professional standards nor traditional repertoire bothered old-fashioned elites, but both failed to satisfy new tycoons. A capitalist combine including Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Morgan, and Carnegie underwrote a rival, the New York Symphony Orchestra (1878), another Leopold Damrosch project. Orchestra war ensued. In one notable sally Damrosch stole the American premiere of Brahms’s First Symphony from under Thomas’s nose.

The mind is an orchestra, the heart is a conductor, and the soul is a symphony.

Don’t play it like it’s love. It’s a memory of love. — Francis Travis, the conductor’s instruction to a volunteer orchestra, Tokyo, Japan. His words are now the epigraph to Tess Gallagher’s poem “Near, As All That Is Lost,” from Moon Crossing Bridge (Graywolf Press, 1992)

In 1944, an experiment was conducted that should have conclusively proven that DNA was actually the carrier of the genetic code, but these results were resisted and largely ignored. Scientists had convinced themselves that DNA was too simple to be the conductor of the orchestra, and clung to this belief. Again, once consensus is reached, it isn’t easily overcome,

We need an orchestrated, “positive liberty” world. We need geniuses to compose the symphonies, inspiring conductors to lead the orchestra, brilliant musicians for each instrument, singers able to execute fantastic harmonies, audiences capable of appreciating the highest quality and being transported out of themselves and spurred on to achieve great things themselves.

There is a story of some great conductor of a musical festival suddenly throwing up his baton, and stopping the performance, crying, "Flageolet!" The flageolet was not doing its part and the conductor's trained ear missed its one note in the large orchestra. Does not God miss any voice that is silent in the music of earth that rises up to him? And are there not many voices that are silent, taking no part in the song, giving forth no praise? Shall we not quickly start our heart-song of gratitude, calling upon every power of our being to praise God?

If the kitchen of the Boyarsky is an orchestra and Emile its conductor, then his chopping knife is the baton.

I didn’t want to hurt her, even though I was mad at her for her attitude toward me. Unfortunately, when I handed her one of the quarterstaffs, she smiled and twisted it around expertly, as if she had used one all her life. I grimaced, hearing the swish of air as it cut close to me. I, in turn, tried to twizzle my staff but felt like a conductor of an orchestra, not a deadly fighter.

A startup founder is like a conductor of an orchestra, initially playing every instrument. Whilst playing the instruments also finding talented people to take over each instrument and raise $ to buy better instruments. All whilst ensuring the crowd doesn't leave and grows!

Who in an orchestra is most likely to be struck by lightning?” he called to his children. “The conductor.

No conductor of any symphony orchestra requires more sensitivity, more powers of observation, more finely tuned instincts, more passionate desires for perfection than the great classic racehorse trainer.

They decide that scratching your head is the best path to an itch-free future. Dopamine cells give the signal to do it, but that’s where dopamine—and conscious involvement—come to an end. Dopamine is the conductor, not the orchestra. In some ways the dopaminergic command, do it, is the easiest part. What comes next is so

If the orchestra conductor had made a more concerted effort not to miss the concert, he would have been less disconcerted.

Mastering this trinity of influence is akin to an orchestra conductor leading a symphony, where the harmonious interaction of disparate components creates a resonant impact that far exceeds the sum of its parts.

Propriety is the conductor of harmony in the orchestra of our interactions, ensuring that every note we play resonates with respect and consideration.

Listen up, mind maestro! It's time to fine-tune those thoughts, remix them if you need to, and hit that "delete" button on that pesky ego track. We're the conductors of this epic symphony, and we're going to make sure our mind orchestra plays tunes of brilliance, wit, and wisdom.

Partly thanks to Helsinki’s Sibelius Academy, Finnish musical education is among the best in the world, with Finnish conductors, singers and musicians performing with some of the world’s top orchestras. There are some excellent classical-music festivals in Finland.

Jam to some tunes. Anything that helps you relax and especially breathe more deeply assists your lymph to circulate. Listening to music works; singing or playing an instrument has an even more powerful effect. Orchestra conductors live longer; they move their lymph through the chest via their arm movements. Go ahead and dance, air-conduct, and enjoy your favorite music. I played music all the time in

The vagus nerve is the conductor of the human body symphony orchestra.

This is an orchestra. You are the composer and conductor.

He’s the conductor, conducting the chaos that is my orchestra, the music he creates becoming more intense with every stroke of that skilled tongue.

What harmony is there between Christ and Belial?” (v. 15). The word harmony here is a musical term. We aren’t even playing in the same orchestra with the unsaved! We aren’t following the same conductor or reading the same score. Therefore, how can we ever make music together?

The ultimate space-measurer in Dutch football is of course, Johan Cruyff. He was only seventeen when he first played at Ajax, yet even then he delivered running commentaries on the use of space to the rest of the team, telling them where to run, where not to run. Players did what the tiny, skinny teenager told them to do because he was right. Cruyff didn't talk about abstract space but about specific, detailed spatial relations on the field. Indeed, the most abiding image of him as a player is not of him scoring or running or tackling. It is of Cruyff pointing. 'No, not there, back a little... forward two metres... four metres more to the left.' He seemed like a conductor directing a symphony orchestra. It was as if Cruyff was helping his colleagues to realize an approximate rendering on the field to match the sublime vision in his mind of how the space ought to be ordered.

Whether we are orderlies or orchestra conductors, either we befriend our work-- seeing in it the opportunity for moral excellence and a continual outpouring of heavenly grace-- or we become its victim.

In addition to increasing empathy, neurobiological research proves that reading fiction changes the biology of the brain, making it more receptive and connected. Reading novels also makes you more creative and open-minded, gives you psychological courage, and keeps your brain active and healthy. The therapeutic value of reading novels is so profound that it has birthed something called bibliotherapy, in which clients are matched with a literary fiction designed to address what is ailing them, from mild depression to a troubled intimate relationship to a desire to find a work/ family balance. Anyone who belongs to a book club has likely experienced a version of fiction's healing powers. The value of reading is even more significant if you're a writer. Imagine being a chef who eats only chicken nuggets, a carpenter who refuses to look at buildings, or an orchestra conductor who doesn't listen to anything but commercial jingles. Such is the problem for a writer who doesn't read regularly and widely.

11 — I have explained where Wagner belongs—not in the history of music. What does he signify nevertheless in that history? The emergence of the actor in music: a capital event that invites thought, perhaps also fear. In a formula: "Wagner and Liszt."— Never yet has the integrity of musicians, their "authenticity," been put to the test so dangerously. One can grasp it with one's very hands: great success, success with the masses no longer sides with those who are authentic,—one has to be an actor to achieve that!— Victor Hugo and Richard Wagner—they both prove one and the same thing: that in declining civilizations, wherever the mob is allowed to decide, genuineness becomes superfluous, prejudicial, unfavorable. The actor, alone, can still kindle great enthusiasm.— And thus it is his golden age which is now dawning—his and that of all those who are in any way related to him. With drums and fifes, Wagner marches at the head of all artists in declamation, in display and virtuosity. He began by convincing the conductors of orchestras, the scene-shifters and stage-singers, not to forget the orchestra:—he "redeemed" them from monotony .... The movement that Wagner created has spread even to the land of knowledge: whole sciences pertaining to music are rising slowly, out of centuries of scholasticism. As an example of what I mean, let me point more particularly to Riemann's [Hugo Riemann (1849-1919): music theoretician] services to rhythmic; he was the first who called attention to the leading idea in punctuation—even for music (unfortunately he did so with a bad word; he called it "phrasing"). All these people, and I say it with gratitude, are the best, the most respectable among Wagner's admirers—they have a perfect right to honor Wagner. The same instinct unites them with one another; in him they recognize their highest type, and since he has inflamed them with his own ardor they feel themselves transformed into power, even into great power. In this quarter, if anywhere, Wagner's influence has really been beneficial. Never before has there been so much thinking, willing, and industry in this sphere. Wagner endowed all these artists with a new conscience: what they now exact and obtain from themselves, they had never extracted before Wagner's time—before then they had been too modest. Another spirit prevails on the stage since Wagner rules there: the most difficult things are expected, blame is severe, praise very scarce—the good and the excellent have become the rule. Taste is no longer necessary, nor even is a good voice. Wagner is sung only with ruined voices: this has a more "dramatic" effect. Even talent is out of the question. Expressiveness at all costs, which is what the Wagnerian ideal—the ideal of décadence—demands, is hardly compatible with talent. All that is required for this is virtue—that is to say, training, automatism, "self-denial." Neither taste, voices, nor gifts: Wagner's stage requires one thing only—Teutons! ... Definition of the Teuton: obedience and long legs ... It is full of profound significance that the arrival of Wagner coincides in time with the arrival of the "Reich": both actualities prove the very same thing: obedience and long legs.— Never has obedience been better, never has commanding. Wagnerian conductors in particular are worthy of an age that posterity will call one day, with awed respect, the classical age of war. Wagner understood how to command; in this, too, he was the great teacher. He commanded as the inexorable will to himself, as lifelong self-discipline: Wagner who furnishes perhaps the greatest example of self-violation in the history of art (—even Alfieri, who in other respects is his next-of-kin, is outdone by him. The note of a Torinese). 12 The insight that our actors are more deserving of admiration than ever does not imply that they are any less dangerous ... But who could still doubt what I want,—what are the three demands for which my my love of art has compelled me?

The role of the body was thus to reproduce in action the life of the mind, to emphasize its motor articulations as the orchestra conductor does for a musical score; the brain did not have thinking as its function but that of hindering the thought from becoming lost in dream; it was the organ of attention to life. Such was the conclusion to which I was led by the specially detailed study of normal and pathological facts, more generally through external observation. But only then did I become aware of the fact that inward experience in the pure state, in giving us a “substance” whose very essence is to endure and consequently continually to prolong into the present an indestructible past, would have relieved me from seeking, and would even have forbidden me to seek, where memories are preserved. They preserve themselves, as we admit, for example, when we pronounce a word. In order to pronounce it we have to remember the first half of it while we are articulating the second. But no one will think that the first has been immediately deposited in a drawer, cerebral or otherwise, so that consciousness may come for it a moment later. But if that is the case for the first half of the word, it will be the same for the preceding word, which is an integral part of it as far as sound and meaning are concerned; it will be the same from the beginning of the sentence, and the preceding sentence, and the whole discourse that we could have made very long, indefinitely long had we wished. Now, our whole life, from the time of our first awakening to consciousness, is something like this indefinitely prolonged discourse. Its duration is substantial, indivisible insofar as it is pure duration.

The violin was considered the leader of the orchestra before conductors became common.