Symphony Orchestra Quotes

My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.

The alarm in the morning? Well, I have an old tape of Carlo Maria Giulini conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in a perfectly transcendent version in Shubert's seventh symphony. And I've rigged it up so that at exactly 7:30 every morning it falls from the ceiling onto my face.

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.

My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tambours I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.

If all experienced God in the same way and returned Him an identical worship, the song of the Church triumphant would have no symphony, it would be played like an orchestra in which all instruments played the same note.

The tuning up of an orchestra can be itself delightful, but only to those who can in some measure, however little, anticipate the symphony.

The waters of the stream played the part of the orchestra, and the sunlight provided the dancers. Every now and then a crescendo of wind highlighted the symphony in the clearing by the creek.

When a group of people sing together, we make up a chorus. When birds do, it's more like a whole symphony orchestra.

He suggested that Joe think of a well-rowed race as a symphony, and himself as just one player in the orchestra. If one fellow in an orchestra was playing out of tune, or playing at a different tempo, the whole piece would naturally be ruined. That’s the way it was with rowing. What mattered more than how hard a man rowed was how well everything he did in the boat harmonized with what the other fellows were doing.

Terrorism” is a word that has become a plague on our vocabulary, the excuse and reason and moral permit for state-sponsored violence— our violence—which is now used on the innocent of the Middle East ever more outrageously and promiscuously. Terrorism, terrorism, terrorism. It has become a full stop, a punctuation mark, a phrase, a speech, a sermon, the be-all and end-all of everything that we must hate in order to ignore injustice and occupation and murder on a mass scale. Terror, terror, terror, terror. It is a sonata, a symphony, an orchestra tuned to every television and radio station and news agency report, the soap-opera of the Devil, served up on prime-time or distilled in wearyingly dull and mendacious form by the right-wing “commentators” of the American east coast or the Jerusalem Post or the intellectuals of Europe. Strike against Terror. Victory over Terror. War on Terror. Everlasting War on Terror. Rarely in history have soldiers and journalists and presidents and kings aligned themselves in such thoughtless, unquestioning ranks.

My wife says books aren't real." "Thank God for that. You can shut them, say, 'Hold on a moment.' You play God to it. But who has ever torn himself from the claw that encloses you when you drop a seed in a TV and parlour? It grows you any shape it wishes! It is an environment as real as the world. It becomes truth and is the truth. Books can be beaten down with reason. But with all my knowledge and scepticism, I have never been able to argue with a one-hundred piece symphony orchestra, full colour, three dimension, and I being in and part of those incredible parlours.

"My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tambours I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony."

The gown rustles and slides around her, speaking a glossolalia all of its own, the silk moving against the rougher nap of the underskirts, the bone supports of the bodice straining and squealing against their coverings, the cuffs scuffing and chafing the skin of her wrists, the stiffened collar hooking and nibbling at her nape, the hip supports creaking like the rigging of a ship. It is a symphony, an orchestra of fabrics, and Lucrezia would like to cover her ears, but she cannot.

My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments with fiddle-strings & harps, drums & tambourines, I sound & clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.

String theory makes sense to me because the universe is a symphony that creates harmony with the vibration of our strings.

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

Demand for a product is affected by the cost and quality, broadly defined, of substitute products. If the cost of a substitute falls in relative terms, or if its ability improves to satisfy the buyer’s needs, industry growth will be adversely affected (and vice versa). Examples are the inroads that television and radio have made on the demand for live concerts by symphony orchestras and other performing groups; the growth in demand for magazine advertising space as television advertising rates climb sharply and prime advertising television time becomes increasingly scarce; and the depressing effect of rising prices on the demand of such products as chocolate candy and soft drinks relative to their substitutes.

There are many different things in this world to hide, but a secret is not one of them. It is difficult to hide an airplane, for instance, because you generally need to find a deep hole or an enormous haystack, and sneak the airplane inside in the middle of the night, but it is easy to hide a secret about an airplane, because you can merely write it on a tiny piece of paper and tape it to the bottom of your mattress any time you are at home. It is difficult to hide a symphony orchestra, because you usually need to rent a soundproof room and borrow as many sleeping bags as you can find, but it is easy to hide a secret about a symphony orchestra, because you can merely whisper it into the ear of a trustworthy friend or music critic. And it is difficult to hind yourself, because you sometimes need to stuff yourself into the trunk of an automobile, or concoct a disguise out of whatever you can find, but it is easy to hide a secret about yourself because you can merely type it into a book and hope it falls into the right hands. My dear sister, if you are reading things I am still alive, and heading north to try and find you.

She took the disc in her hand, holding it by the edges. Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Erich Leinsdorf conducting. ‘I just thought you should hear what you look like,’ said Elton.

It wasn't a wedding a small girl dreams of - the white lace dress and a flowing veil. There were no bridesmaids or a symphony orchestra or long trails of white roses. But what does a small girl know of real love?

Up the street a song cloud floats by, sagging a bit, but still intact. I walk faster and catch up with it just in time to hear the ending, a symphony orchestra, the sound full and resplendent, and it is one of those times, you know those times every so often when you hear the right piece of music at the right time, and it just makes you think.

One note does not make a symphony; one artist does not make an orchestra.

My soul is a hidden orchestra; I know not what instruments, what fiddlestrings and harps, drums and tamboura I sound and clash inside myself. All I hear is the symphony.” ― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

The human mind is only capable of absorbing a few things at a time. We see what is taking place in front of us in the here and now, and cannot envisage simultaneously a succession of processes, no matter how integrated and complementary. Our faculties of perception are consequently limited even as regards fairly simple phenomena. The fate of a single man can be rich with significance, that of a few hundred less so, but the history of thousands and millions of men does not mean anything at all, in any adequate sense of the word. The symmetriad is a million—a billion, rather—raised to the power of N: it is incomprehensible. We pass through vast halls, each with a capacity of ten Kronecker units, and creep like so many ants clinging to the folds of breathing vaults and craning to watch the flight of soaring girders, opalescent in the glare of searchlights, and elastic domes which criss-cross and balance each other unerringly, the perfection of a moment, since everything here passes and fades. The essence of this architecture is movement synchronized towards a precise objective. We observe a fraction of the process, like hearing the vibration of a single string in an orchestra of supergiants. We know, but cannot grasp, that above and below, beyond the limits of perception or imagination, thousands and millions of simultaneous transformations are at work, interlinked like a musical score by mathematical counterpoint. It has been described as a symphony in geometry, but we lack the ears to hear it.

Usually, the murmur that rises up from Paris by day is the city talking; in the night it is the city breathing; but here it is the city singing. Listen, then, to this chorus of bell-towers - diffuse over the whole the murmur of half a million people - the eternal lament of the river - the endless sighing of the wind - the grave and distant quartet of the four forests placed upon the hills, in the distance, like immense organpipes - extinguish to a half light all in the central chime that would otherwise be too harsh or too shrill; and then say whetehr you know of anything in the world more rich, more joyous, more golden, more dazzling, than this tumult of bells and chimes - this furnace of music - these thousands of brazen voices, all singing together in flutes of stone three hundred feet high, than this city which is but one orchestra - this symphony which roars like a tempest.

We did not spend our days gazing into each other’s eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention. Lovemaking is not a third thing but two-in-one. John Keats can be a third thing, or the Boston Symphony Orchestra, or Dutch interiors, or Monopoly. For many couples, children are a third thing.” —

My soul is like a hidden orchestra; I do not know which instruments grind and play away inside of me, strings and harps, timbales and drums. I can only recognize myself as symphony.

The foragers may have had their all-conquering Napoleons, who ruled empires half the size of Luxembourg; gifted Beethovens who lacked symphony orchestras but brought people to tears with the sound of their bamboo flutes; and charismatic prophets who revealed the words of a local oak tree rather than those of a universal creator god. But these are all mere guesses.

Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention. Lovemaking is not a third thing but two-in-one. John Keats can be a third thing, or the Boston Symphony Orchestra, or Dutch interiors, or Monopoly.

Being a Pilgrim To journey without being changed is to be a nomad. To change without journeying is to be a chameleon. To journey and to be transformed by the journey is to be a pilgrim. We all start out as pilgrims, wanting to journey and hoping to be transformed by the journey. But, just as it is impossible when listening to an orchestra to hear the whole of the symphony for very long before we are drawn to hear only the piano or the violin, in just this way, our attention to life slips and we experience people and places without being affected by their wholeness. And sometimes, feeling isolated and unsure, we change or hide what lives within in order to please or avoid others. The value of this insight is not to use it to judge or berate ourselves, but to help one another see that integrity is an unending process of letting our inner experience and our outer experience complete each other, in spite of our very human lapses. I understand these things so well, because I violate them so often. Yet I, as you, consider myself a pilgrim of the deepest kind, journeying beyond any one creed or tradition, into the compelling, recurring space in which we know the moment and are changed by it. Mysteriously, as elusive as it is, this moment—where the eye is what it sees, where the heart is what it feels—this moment shows us that what is real is sacred.

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

things were created by God and for God, no exceptions. Every note of music. Every color on the palette. Every flavor that tingles the taste buds. Arnold Summerfield, the German physicist and pianist, observed that a single hydrogen atom, which emits one hundred frequencies, is more musical than a grand piano, which only emits eighty-eight frequencies. Every single atom is a unique expression of God’s creative genius. And that means every atom is a unique expression of worship. According to composer Leonard Bernstein, the best translation of Genesis 1:3 and several other verses in Genesis 1 is not “and God said.” He believed a better translation is “and God sang.” The Almighty sang every atom into existence, and every atom echoes that original melody sung in three-part harmony by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Did you know that the electron shell of the carbon atom produces the same harmonic scale as the Gregorian chant? Or that whale songs can travel thousands of miles underwater? Or that meadowlarks have a range of three hundred notes? But the songs we can hear audibly are only one instrument in the symphony orchestra called creation. Research in the field of bioacoustics has revealed that we are surrounded by millions of ultrasonic songs. Supersensitive sound instruments have discovered that even earthworms make faint staccato sounds! Lewis Thomas put it this way: “If we had better hearing, and could discern the descants [singing] of sea birds, the rhythmic tympani [drumming] of schools of mollusks, or even the distant harmonics of midges [flies] hanging over meadows in the sun, the combined sound might lift us off our feet.” Someday the sound will lift us off our feet. Glorified eardrums will reveal millions of songs previously inaudible to the human ear.

But it takes the whole brain, working and communicating together, harmoniously and in sync—like a symphony orchestra or a football team—for creativity to happen. The spark comes not from any one point but from all the points uniting in a grand network.

The people welcome a new da yas if they were certain of liking it, the shopkeepers pull up their blinds serene in the expectation of good trade, the workers go happily to their work, the people who have sat up all night in night clubs go happily to their rest, the orchestra of motor-car horns, of clanking trams, of whistling policemen tunes up for the daily symphony, and everywhere is joy.

This life may be compared to playing one instrument in a large orchestra. Naturally you cannot play all the instruments at the same time. You can only focus on your part of the beautiful symphony, although the entire orchestra and all the music comprises the totality of who you really are.

You shop in supermarkets, you say good morning to friends on the telephone, you hear symphony orchestras on the radio. But suddenly the music stops and a terrorist bomb is reported. A new explosion outside a coffee shop on the Jaffa Road: six young people killed and thirty-eight more wounded. Pained, you put down your civilized drink.

The world is an orchestra, the universe is a symphony.

My soul is a hidden orchestra; I do not know what instruments, what violins and harps, drums and tambours, sound and clash inside me. I know myself only as a symphony.

Every symphony, for example, is a sonata for orchestra; every string quartet is a sonata for four strings; every concerto a sonata for a solo instrument and orchestra.

It's a heady aphrodisiac being exposed to his unique voice when he adopts that tone. His voice reverbs on a bunch of notes simultaneously. It's the first thing you notice about Ryan, his voice sounds like an orchestra playing a symphony composed by angels. It's most distracting until you grow immune to it, and now I'm back to completely infected with the Ryan voice virus.

It is something that I discovered, a kind of symphony, a kind of orchestra that plays one melody in your presence, but when you depart, the orchestra doesn't stop. When I meet someone else, it plays another melody, which is also very delightful. And when I'm alone, it continues to play. There's a great repertoire, and it never ceases to play. That's what awakening is all about.

The bass engaged my imagination so differently than the trumpet. Blowing the trumpet, I dreamed of playing with the jazz greats, being in a majestic symphony orchestra, growing into a respected man, cool and distinct. But as soon as I picked up that bass I was an animal... I fell in love with rock music... I started looking at music in a new way, seeing color and attitude instead of notes and scales.

A city one loves exists at no matter what distance, and its symphony is sometimes heard more clearly when one is away, as the music of an orchestra is more lucid to an audience that it sounds to the performers on the stage.

There’s no culture here,” she said. But if there had been an opera house or a symphony orchestra—that’s what she meant by “culture”—she never would have gone. She thought she was sophisticated—she liked fine clothes, good liquor—but she knew nothing about art. She didn’t read anything but romance novels. There were no freshly cut flowers around the house. She mostly watched TV and smoked in bed all day, as far as I could tell. That was her “culture.

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.

He had not been in El Paso for years, and they had developed it considerably since then, he'd heard, along the lines of sin and salvation. They had churches and a Republican or two and a smart of banks and a symphony orchestra and five railroads and a lumberyard and the makings of a library. So much for sin. On the side of salvation they had ninety-some saloons, just shy of one for every hundred citizens, although municipal goodyism had moved the gambling rooms out back or upstairs.

Lend your ear then to this tutti of steeples; diffuse over the whole the buzz of half a million of human beings, the eternal murmur of the river, the infinite piping of the wind, the grave and distant quartet of the four forests placed like immense organs on the four hills of the horizon; soften down, as with a demi-tint, all that is too shrill and too harsh in the central mass of sound, and say if you know any thing in the world more rich, more gladdening, more dazzling than that tumult of bells; than that furnace of music; than those ten thousand brazen tones breathed all at once from flutes of stone three hundred feet high; than that city which is but one orchestra; than that symphony rushing and roaring like a tempest.

These long millennia may well have witnessed wars and revolutions, ecstatic religious movements, profound philosophical theories, incomparable artistic masterpieces. The foragers may have had their all-conquering Napoleons, who ruled empires half the size of Luxembourg; gifted Beethovens who lacked symphony orchestras but brought people to tears with the sound of their bamboo flutes; and charismatic prophets who revealed the words of a local oak tree rather than those of a universal creator god. But these are all mere guesses. The curtain of silence is so thick that we cannot even be sure such things occurred – let alone describe them in detail.

After the death of the poet Jane Kenyon, her husband Donald Hall wrote, “We did not spend our days gazing into each other’s eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention.” Hall goes on to note that third things might be John Keats or the Boston Symphony Orchestra or Dutch interiors or children.

But to depend on another psychologically — to depend on another emotionally — what does that imply? It means to depend on another human being for my happiness. Think about that. Because if you do, the next thing you will be doing, whether you’re aware of it or not, is demanding that other people contribute to your happiness. Then there will be a next step — fear, fear of loss, fear of alienation, fear of rejection, mutual control. Perfect love casts out fear. Where there is love there are no demands, no expectations, no dependency. I do not demand that you make me happy; my happiness does not lie in you. If you were to leave me, I will not feel sorry for myself; I enjoy your company immensely, but I do not cling. Can you enjoy the relationship on a non-clinging basis, where what you really enjoy is not that person; it’s something that’s greater than both you and the other person. It is a kind of symphony, a kind of orchestra that plays one melody in one person’s presence, but when he or she departs, the orchestra doesn’t stop. When I meet someone else, it plays another melody, which is also very delightful. And when I’m alone, it continues to play. There’s a great repertoire and it never ceases to play.

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.

The televisor is ‘real.’ It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn’t time to protest, ‘What nonsense!’ ” “Only the ‘family’ is ‘people.’ ” “I beg pardon?” “My wife says books aren’t ‘real.’ ” “Thank God for that. You can shut them, say, ‘Hold on a moment.’ You play God to it. But who has ever torn himself from the claw that encloses you when you drop a seed in a TV parlor? It grows you any shape it wishes! It is an environment as real as the world. It becomes and is the truth. Books can be beaten down with reason. But with all my knowledge and skepticism, I have never been able to argue with a one-hundred-piece symphony orchestra, full color, three dimensions, and being in and part of those incredible parlors. As you see, my parlor is nothing but four plaster walls. And here.” He held out two small rubber plugs. “For my ears when I ride the subway jets.

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.

Birds arrived. Gulls landed within weeks of the island’s emergence, depositing the guano that built a richer soil. Fulmars and guillemots were the first to nest. Snow buntings and graylag geese came, almost ninety bird species in all, and twenty-one species of butterfly and moth. The first bush—a willow—came fifteen years after creation, and five years after the willows, seals were breeding on the young island. The descriptions make Surtsey sound like an orchestra, one instrument after another joining until there was the symphony that is an ecosystem.

The singing of birds became an orchestra- a symphony of gossip and mirth. I'd never heard so many layers of music, never heard the variations and themes that wove between their arpeggios. And beyond the birdsong, there was an ethereal melody- a woman, melancholy and weary... the willow. Gasping, I opened my eyes. The world had become richer, clearer. The brook was a near-invisible rainbow of water that flowed over stones as invitingly smooth as silk. The trees were clothed in a faint shimmer that radiated from their centres and danced along the edges of their leaves. There was no tangy metallic stench- no, the smell of magic had become like jasmine, like lilac, like roses. I would never be able to paint it, the richness, the feel- Maybe fractions of it, but not the whole thing. Magic- everything was magic, and it broke my heart.

One athlete does not make a team. One singer does not make a band. One actor does not make an ensemble. One participant does not make a contest. One employee does not make a company. One stroke does not make a portrait. One word does not make an essay. One paragraph does not make a thesis. One note does not make a symphony. One instrument does not make an orchestra. One finger does not make a hand. One toe does not make a foot. One lip does not make a voice. One member does not make a body. One cell does not make a being. One memory does not make an experience. One habit does not make a character. One act does not make a destiny. One day does not make a year. One moment does not make a lifetime. One man does not make a family. One home does not make a neighborhood. One clan does not make nation. One tribe does not make a continent. One people does not make a world.

We pass through vast halls, each with a capacity of ten Kronecker units, and creep like so many ants clinging to the folds of breathing vaults and craning to watch the flight of soaring girders, opalescent in the glare of searchlights, and elastic domes which criss-cross and balance each other unerringly, the perfection of a moment, since everything here passes and fades. The essence of this architecture is movement synchronized towards a precise objective. We observe a fraction of the process, like hearing the vibration of a single string in an orchestra of supergiants. We know, but cannot grasp, that above and below, beyond the limits of perception or imagination, thousands and millions of simultaneous transformations are at work, interlinked like a musical score by mathematical counterpoint. It has been described as a symphony in geometry, but we lack the ears to hear it.

Behold at a sign from heaven, because it comes from the Sun itself, those thousand churches trembling all at once. At first a faint tinkling passes from church to church...see how, all of a sudden, at the same moment, there rises from each steeple as it were a column of sound, a cloud of harmony. At first the vibration of each bell rises straight, pure, and in a manner separate from that of the others, into the splendid morning sky; then swelling by degrees, they blend, melt, intermingle, and amalgamate into a magnificent concert...this sea of harmony, however, is not chaos... This is truly an opera well worth listening to...In this case the city sings....Say if you know anything in the world more rich, more joyful, more golden, more overwhelming than that tumult of bells, than that furnace of music, than those ten thousand voices of bronze singing all at once from flutes of stone three hundred feet high, than that city which has become an orchestra, than that symphony which roars like a storm.

Murakami: Had you been listening to Mahler before Bernstein got you started? Ozawa: No, not at all. […] It was a huge shock for me – until then I never even knew music like that existed. I mean, here at Tanglewood, playing Tchaikovsky and Debussy, and meanwhile there’s this guy putting all his energy into studying Mahler. I could feel the blood draining from my face. I had to order my own copies right then and there. After that, I started reading Mahler like crazy – the First, the Second, the Fifth. Murakami: Did you enjoy just reading the scores? Ozawa: Oh, tremendously. I mean, it was the first time in my life I had ever seen anything like them. To think there were scores like this! Murakami: Was it a completely different world from the music you had been playing until then? Ozawa: First of all, I was amazed that there was someone who knew how to use an orchestra so well. It was extreme – his marvelous ability to put every component of the orchestra to use. And from the orchestra’s point of view, the Mahler symphonies are the most challenging pieces ever.

You look beautiful,” my dad said as he walked over to me and offered his arm. His voice was quiet--even quieter than his normal quiet--and it broke, trailed off, died. I took his arm, and together we walked forward, toward the large wooden doors that led to the beautiful sanctuary where I’d been baptized as a young child just after our family joined the Episcopal church. Where I’d been confirmed by the bishop at the age of twelve. I’d worn a Black Watch plaid Gunne Sax dress that day. It had delicate ribbon trim and a lace-up tie in the back--a corset-style tie, which, I realized, foreshadowed the style of my wedding gown. I looked through the windows and down the aisle and could see myself kneeling there, the bishop’s wrinkled, weathered hands on my auburn hair. I shivered with emotion, feeling the sting in my nose…and the warm beginnings of nostalgia-driven tears. Biting my bottom lip, I stepped forward with my father. Connell had started walking down the aisle as the organist began playing “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” I could close my eyes and hear the same music playing on the eight-track tape player in my mom’s Oldsmobile station wagon. Was it the London Symphony Orchestra or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir? I suddenly couldn’t remember. But that’s why I’d chosen it for the processional--not because it appeared on Modern Bride’s list of acceptable wedding processionals, but because it reminded me of childhood…of Bach…of home. I watched as Becky followed Connell, and then my sister, Betsy, her almost jet-black hair shining in the beautiful light of the church. I was so glad to have a sister. Ms. Altar Guild gently coaxed my father and me toward the door. “It’s time,” she whispered. My stomach fell. What was happening? Where was I? Who was I? At that very moment, my worlds were colliding--the old world with the new, the past life with the future. I felt my dad inhale deeply, and I followed his lead. He was nervous; I could feel it. I was nervous, too. As we took our place in the doorway, I squeezed his arm and whispered, “I love thee.” It was our little line. “I love thee, too,” he whispered back. And as I turned my head toward the front of the church, my eyes went straight to him--to Marlboro Man, who was standing dead ahead, looking straight at me.

And if you wish to receive of the ancient city an impression with which the modern one can no longer furnish you, climb—on the morning of some grand festival, beneath the rising sun of Easter or of Pentecost—climb upon some elevated point, whence you command the entire capital; and be present at the wakening of the chimes. Behold, at a signal given from heaven, for it is the sun which gives it, all those churches quiver simultaneously. First come scattered strokes, running from one church to another, as when musicians give warning that they are about to begin. Then, all at once, behold!—for it seems at times, as though the ear also possessed a sight of its own,—behold, rising from each bell tower, something like a column of sound, a cloud of harmony. First, the vibration of each bell mounts straight upwards, pure and, so to speak, isolated from the others, into the splendid morning sky; then, little by little, as they swell they melt together, mingle, are lost in each other, and amalgamate in a magnificent concert. It is no longer anything but a mass of sonorous vibrations incessantly sent forth from the numerous belfries; floats, undulates, bounds, whirls over the city, and prolongs far beyond the horizon the deafening circle of its oscillations. Nevertheless, this sea of harmony is not a chaos; great and profound as it is, it has not lost its transparency; you behold the windings of each group of notes which escapes from the belfries. You can follow the dialogue, by turns grave and shrill, of the treble and the bass; you can see the octaves leap from one tower to another; you watch them spring forth, winged, light, and whistling, from the silver bell, to fall, broken and limping from the bell of wood; you admire in their midst the rich gamut which incessantly ascends and re-ascends the seven bells of Saint-Eustache; you see light and rapid notes running across it, executing three or four luminous zigzags, and vanishing like flashes of lightning. Yonder is the Abbey of Saint-Martin, a shrill, cracked singer; here the gruff and gloomy voice of the Bastille; at the other end, the great tower of the Louvre, with its bass. The royal chime of the palace scatters on all sides, and without relaxation, resplendent trills, upon which fall, at regular intervals, the heavy strokes from the belfry of Notre-Dame, which makes them sparkle like the anvil under the hammer. At intervals you behold the passage of sounds of all forms which come from the triple peal of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Then, again, from time to time, this mass of sublime noises opens and gives passage to the beats of the Ave Maria, which bursts forth and sparkles like an aigrette of stars. Below, in the very depths of the concert, you confusedly distinguish the interior chanting of the churches, which exhales through the vibrating pores of their vaulted roofs. Assuredly, this is an opera which it is worth the trouble of listening to. Ordinarily, the noise which escapes from Paris by day is the city speaking; by night, it is the city breathing; in this case, it is the city singing. Lend an ear, then, to this concert of bell towers; spread over all the murmur of half a million men, the eternal plaint of the river, the infinite breathings of the wind, the grave and distant quartette of the four forests arranged upon the hills, on the horizon, like immense stacks of organ pipes; extinguish, as in a half shade, all that is too hoarse and too shrill about the central chime, and say whether you know anything in the world more rich and joyful, more golden, more dazzling, than this tumult of bells and chimes;—than this furnace of music,—than these ten thousand brazen voices chanting simultaneously in the flutes of stone, three hundred feet high,—than this city which is no longer anything but an orchestra,—than this symphony which produces the noise of a tempest.

The Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians demanded, “The orchestra must become like a factory.

the hints of some pensive character crushed and beaten by brutal marches — the orchestra warding off the blows . . . cruel, clumsy waltzes, like some Russian dancing bear willing to maul a partner . . . And perhaps most chilling of all, they recognized the moments after these assaults, when stillness arrives, and it does not feel like peace, but a stunned, appalled hush . . . as if someone, in the wake of a beating, first opens their eyes to a cold and crystalline new world in which they do not know how to feel.

There are subtle nuances and nutritive interactions that create disease resistance from the synergy of diverse substances in natural foods. Like a symphony orchestra whose members play in perfect harmony, our body depends on the harmonious interaction of nutrients, both known and unknown. By supplying a rich assortment of natural foods, we best maximize the function of the human masterpiece.

Your laptop is a note in a symphony currently being played by an orchestra of incalculable size. It’s a very small part of a much greater whole. Most of its capacity resides beyond its hard shell. It maintains its function only because a vast array of other technologies are currently and harmoniously at play. It is fed, for example, by a power grid whose function is invisibly dependent on the stability of a myriad of complex physical, biological, economic and interpersonal systems. The factories that make its parts are still in operation. The operating system that enables its function is based on those parts, and not on others yet to be created. Its video hardware runs the technology expected by the creative people who post their content on the web. Your laptop is in communication with a certain, specified ecosystem of other devices and web servers. And, finally, all this is made possible by an even less visible element: the social contract of trust—the interconnected and fundamentally honest political and economic systems that make the reliable electrical grid a reality. This interdependency of part on whole, invisible in systems that work, becomes starkly evident in systems that don’t. The higher-order, surrounding systems that enable personal computing hardly exist at all in corrupt, third-world countries, so that the power lines, electrical switches, outlets, and all the other entities so hopefully and concretely indicative of such a grid are absent or compromised, and in fact make little contribution to the practical delivery of electricity to people’s homes and factories. This makes perceiving the electronic and other devices that electricity theoretically enables as separate, functional units frustrating, at minimum, and impossible, at worst. This is partly because of technical insufficiency: the systems simply don’t work. But it is also in no small part because of the lack of trust characteristic of systemically corrupt societies. To put it another way: What you perceive as your computer is like a single leaf, on a tree, in a forest—or, even more accurately, like your fingers rubbing briefly across that leaf. A single leaf can be plucked from a branch. It can be perceived, briefly, as a single, self-contained entity—but that perception misleads more than clarifies. In a few weeks, the leaf will crumble and dissolve. It would not have been there at all, without the tree. It cannot continue to exist, in the absence of the tree. This is the position of our laptops in relation to the world. So much of what they are resides outside their boundaries that the screened devices we hold on our laps can only maintain their computer-like façade for a few short years. Almost everything we see and hold is like that, although often not so evidently

The Atwater-Kent Hour set the standard for early concert music. Sponsored by a well-known radio manufacturer, Atwater-Kent featured stars of the Metropolitan Opera, backed by a large symphony orchestra. The obstacles to producing such a show in radio’s earliest days were political, economic, and personal. Stations were proliferating, and there was no real consensus as to how the airwaves should be used. The idea of commercial radio had many critics; others, pointing to the overall excellence of the Atwater-Kent, Eveready, and Palmolive hours, believed that only American capitalism could overcome the dreadful mediocrity that most stations offered. Major talent from the musical stage was needed, but many name performers found the prospect of entertaining for a cigar manufacturer or an oil company reprehensible. Politicians were deeply divided on the questions of regulations and constraints.

Opera halls, ballets, and large art museums receive more funding--and not all from the government--than do popular art and what might be considered popular music venues...But there are plenty of innovative musicians...who have had as much trouble surviving as symphony orchestras and ballet companies...Why not invest in the future of music, instead of building fortresses to preserve its past?...The 2011 annual operating budget for the New York Metropolitan Opera is $325 million; a big chunk of that, $182 million, came from donations from wealthy patrons.

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

Then the orchestra played excerpts from Dvořák's New World Symphony and I kept hearing "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" resounding through its dominant theme--my mother's and grandfather's favorite spiritual. It was more than I could stand, and before the next speaker could begin I hurried past the disapproving eyes of teachers and matrons, out into the night.

Afterward, someone associated with the orchestra asked me in a hushed voice, “Would you like to know who came in early in the Mendelssohn?” Whether it was the slightly conspiratorial nature of the question that put me off, or whether it was that such a question was in disturbing contrast with the spiritedness of the music that we had just performed, I found myself saying, “No” abruptly, and then adding, “I did it.” Not literally, of course. I didn’t actually play the violin. But in that moment, in the context of the great music we had just made, it seemed absurd to me to consider handing out blame. It could only divide us, and for what? Certainly that player would never again come in early in the Italian Symphony, nor, perhaps, from this time on, make the mistake of a premature entrance in any performance. And I myself would know to be especially careful in guiding the orchestra through those eleven steps whenever I conducted that passage again. There was absolutely no gain to blaming anyone, and a real cost in terms of the blow to our integrity as a group. Besides, I know full well that every time I step onto a podium, I take a risk that things won’t turn out exactly as I anticipate them in my ear—but then, there is no great music-making without such risk taking.

Symphony, as I call this aptitude, is the ability to put together the pieces. It is the capacity to synthesize rather than to analyze; to see relationships between seemingly unrelated fields; to detect broad patterns rather than to deliver specific answers; and to invent something new by combining elements nobody else thought to pair. Symphony is also an attribute of the brain’s right hemisphere in the literal, as well as the metaphorical, sense. As I explained in Chapter 2, the neuroscience research conducted with functional MRIs has shown that the right hemisphere operates in a simultaneous, contextual, and symphonic manner. It concerns itself not with a particular spruce but with the whole forest—not with the bassoon player or the first violinist but with the entire orchestra.

A song can take you to so many places you have never been, revisit moments from life, channel a particular emotion, the one which makes you feel elated or lively. A verse, a melody, a couplet, an orchestra, a symphony, they become much more than an art piece, it becomes an emotion, a thought to occupy your mind and attribute focused time and attention.

You can’t quit because there’s a Beyoncé in the world. You can’t quit because you went to see the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and realized that everyone on stage knows more about music than you ever will.

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.

Toscanini was one of the greatest orchestral conductors in the world. Once when he was talking to an orchestra when he was preparing to play one of Beethoven’s symphonies with them he said: “Gentlemen, I am nothing; you are nothing; Beethoven is everything.” He knew well that his duty was not to draw attention to himself or to his orchestra but to obliterate himself and his orchestra and let Beethoven flow through.” Live your life ful y for Jesus; you are but a tool for His service, a reflection in the mirror of Christ. YouTube “Chris Tomlin Jesus

The Philharmonie am Gasteig was the home of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, widely regarded as one of the world’s finest. Tonight it would be under the baton of Sir Simon Rattle, who at that moment was chatting with the orchestra’s first concertmaster.

Poetry as Symphony [10w] Mind is orchestra, words are instruments, the poem, a symphony.

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.

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.

Isabella Stewart Gardner was a talked-about woman. Anyone with a tongue for scandal followed her every provocation, from smoking in public to brandishing large hats during Boston Symphony Orchestra performances. They talked about every male she bumped into, and she bumped into many. She wore French fashion, exposing more flesh than Boston puritans were accustomed to. Even noncontroversial acts fanned the flames of story. She did nothing to quell the rumors about her, adding witty one-liners which appeared with exclamation points in newspaper gossip columns. Henry James cast her life in Portrait of a Lady. Paris

The unfinished symphony that is your life is built on the harmony within your orchestra that grows in number of musicians every time you empathize. As cultures come together, the more

Mahler was superstitious about composers dying after their ninth symphony, as Beethoven did. To avoid the curse, he composed The Song of the Earth, a song cycle for tenor, soprano, and orchestra, immediately after his eighth symphony, and a year later he wrote his actual ninth symphony. It didn't work. Mahler died ofa throat infection shortly thereafter.

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.

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

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.

I’d attended countless symphonies, orchestras, and performances headlined by the best and brightest in the music world, but no song had ever sounded as sweet.

Within the silence of our thoughts lies the orchestra of our potential, waiting to compose the symphony of our lives.

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

Cas sighed. ‘I guess,’ he shrugged. ‘Ever heard of the academic voice?’ The door opened. Jasper was dressed in stained clothes – day clothes. Gone was the robe and crusty night shirt. His bushy eyebrows shaded his milky eyes. ‘The academic voice?’ Jasper seemed to chew the bitter words. He squared his shoulders and cleared his throat. He raised his hand in front of him, moving it as he spoke as if he was conducting some invisible orchestra. ‘Hear my voice from on-high and tremble all ye oppressors of good sense and intellectual advancement. Heed my words, students: relinquish thine will and let me oppress thee instead, for he who is not under my heel cannot learn.’ His arm dropped to his side, and he seem to shrink slightly, as if elocution was the air in his lungs. ‘This voice you are looking for,’ he said quietly, ‘sounds like the slap of mortar on brick. It builds walls between those who think they know and those who thirst to know.

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.

Today, a small box can fill a room in your home with the sound of a violin or of a symphony orchestra—drawing on a library of sound to provide symphony and song in radical abundance, an abundance of music delivered by a very different kind of instrument.

And if you wanted to bring the sound of a symphony orchestra into your home, you would have needed a palace and the wealth of a king.

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.

Even now, days later, my mind echoed with Isabella’s cries as she came all over my hand. I’d attended countless symphonies, orchestras, and performances headlined by the best and brightest in the music world, but no song had ever sounded as sweet.

Judging the musical ability of a top-ranked musician auditioning for a symphony orchestra might seem pretty straightforward. Some people are clearly superior musicians and presumably any expert can tell the difference. As it turns out, this is far from the case. Two economists found that the use of a screen to hide the identity, and thus the gender, of auditioning musicians increased by a full 50 percent the probability that a woman would advance in the audition process. Using a screen increased the likelihood that a woman would win an orchestra seat by 250 percent.

What is required in Judaism is not to agree, but to engage. According to Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, “If a Jew has no one to quarrel with, he quarrels with God, and we call it theology; or he quarrels with himself, and we call it psychology.”8 It was a Jew, Albert Einstein, who proved via the theory of relativity that even scientific observations depend on your perspective. Another Jew, American philosopher Horace Kallen, coined the phrase cultural pluralism and with it the metaphor of civilization as an orchestra in which differences in religion, language, and art can enhance social harmony rather than undermining it.9 In what might seem like the cacophony of yeshiva training, Jews hear a symphony.

flies humming about the place in different keys, like a symphony from a minute orchestra.

A CD of Elgar’s cello concerto, performed by Yo-Yo Ma and the London Symphony Orchestra.

A friend of mine who is an orchestra leader said that the first thing people can do without in a depression is symphonies, but if that is true then the second thing they can do without is drama.

So someone got the even brighter idea to put up a curtain between the people who are auditioning and the judges. And that simple device almost overnight led to women showing up in symphony orchestras in numbers.