Andre Previn
Elliott Carter does not write the kind of music that the kids go off to school whistling.
I don't write things that are wildly abstractly atonal.
I've had the healthy and sobering experience of constantly working with music that is invariably better than any performance of it can be.
I have a great many shortcomings, but writing for something on time has never bothered me.
I found that jazz musicians, possibly more than their classical counterparts, wear long-standing friendships easily and gracefully.
When I composed, I heard my music played by the orchestra within days of completion of the score. No master at a conservatory, no matter how revered, can teach as much by verbal criticism as can a cold and analytical hearing of one's own music being played.
I don't even have a cell phone. I don't know how they work.
At MGM, you knew you were going to be working next year; you knew you were going to get paid. But I was too ambitious musically to settle for it. And I wanted to gamble with whatever talent I might have had.
When you're working with music that is invariably better than you are, it's difficult to become swell-headed.
John Williams is, without question, talented. He writes very good scores and very good melodies and all that.
I run around so much that I finally reasoned that composing is the one musical endeavour which you can do anywhere, anytime.
I stuck around in Hollywood for too long. I was there a long time, and when I left, I was smart enough to realise that what I was leaving was not just the movie business. I wanted to get rid of the whole atmosphere.
I'm on very good terms with all my former wives.
I admire Elliott Carter endlessly. But I have no ambitions to emulate him.
I finally wasn't interested in writing music that played while actors talked.
A Beethoven symphony should be rehearsed like chamber music, only for a lot more people.
People who don't do jazz think it's black magic. But really, it's just a matter of getting used to it. It's fun to gamble. The trick is not to fall back on the things you've done before.
I remain extraordinarily proud of the Vaughan Williams symphonies I recorded with the LSO, and in the 1980s and '90s, I made an almost complete cycle of orchestral works by Richard Strauss with the Vienna Philharmonic.
There's a small group of music critics in the States who will forgive you anything - jazz, a long prison term, or what have you - anything but scoring a Hollywood musical.
I don't ever consciously change gears when I play jazz or classical. It's all music.
Music critics have made it quite clear that any composer who ever contributed a four-bar jingle to a film was to be referred to as a 'Hollywood composer' from then on, even if the rest of his output were to consist solely of liturgical organ sonatas.
The thing is that I'm naturally curious about a lot of different disciplines in music, and I enjoy doing them. And as long as people are nice enough to let me, I'll keep on trying.
It's been thrown up to me most of my life: Why don't I just concentrate on conducting or composing or my own playing or on jazz?
I used to set myself little challenges to make the work more interesting.
I absolutely insist upon adequate rehearsal time - particularly for the pieces that orchestras know best. Because there, the tendency is not to take them apart - rediscover them - and you must.
You can chase a Beethoven symphony all your life and never catch up.Collection: Symphony
There are a million things in music I know nothing about. I just want to narrow down that figure.Collection: Learning
If you're going to do good work, the work has to scare you.Collection: Educational
The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former the music is always graver than its performance - whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being played.Collection: Music