Music is all about leadership and there ain't really a lot of leaders.
We kind of established in Sons of Apollo right from the get go that it would be a very collaborative process musically, but after that, I was going to take the reins and control everything else beyond that the way I did with Dream Theater.
I felt I never needed to fight for a more prominent songwriting and increased vocal role with the Cars.
I feel like I've established myself as a music maker in my own right.
If you're trying to do something wholly new, it's hard to fully trust it. But if you use forms that have come before, it lends your music weight and authority. It's also a way to acknowledge that it's not just you who's feeling these things. The emotions are coming through you from a whole history.
It might be argued that genuine spontaneity is not really possible or desirable so long as printed scores of great works exist. All modern musicians are, for better or worse, prisoners of Gutenberg.
If Paul McCartney tells me that so-and-so song is his favorite song, what do I care? What do I care what anybody else says?
There are two types of conductors. One is the good conductor who can do passionate music but also listen to the singers and do the orchestra. And then there are great conductors, who have their own opinion on the music, who are ruling everything - and not listening much to the singers, but the orchestra play amazingly.
The best thing about this band is I'm the leader!
I guess, from the beginning, Thurston and Kim were the dominant singers in the band, and although I was singing in bands previously, I guess I mainly deferred to them a lot in terms of who was singing the bulk of the songs.
As a major contemporary composer, Madonna should not let the eye dictate to the ear.
The principal task of a conductor is not to put himself in evidence but to disappear behind his functions as much as possible. We are pilots, not servants.
I'm not a great band member; I'm more of a band leader.
My general take on American music since 1969 is that it's just getting stiffer and people are getting more uptight - audience, performance, and palace guard.
When it comes to musicians, I'm like the daddy of musicians here in Cuba.
In the past, there's always been one leader that has led the pack to development of the music.
The Western musical canon came about not merely by accumulation, but by opposition and subversion, both to the ruling powers on whom composers depended for their livelihoods and to other musics.
I don't feel that the conductor has real power. The orchestra has the power, and every member of it knows instantaneously if you're just beating time.
I'm a band dictator.
I've always been in a band where it's been somebody else's band - or pretty much always.
If I belong to a tradition, it is a tradition that makes the masterpiece tell the performer what to do, and not the performer telling the piece what it should be like, or the composer what he ought to have composed.
I realized pretty soon that I have to do more than just play bass in the background way. So, I developed a kind of playing which only a handful of musicians accepted.
The respect for a musical score must come from the director... If the director has no power and has to surrender to budgetary constraints, this is where we have the problem.
My commercial viability, coupled with my reputation, gives me enough freedom to assert my right as a composer.
On the other hand, when I give it closer thought, I realize I'm not enough of a dictator to conduct an orchestra because it requires a pretty awful person. When you read these biographies of famous conductors, they are all awful people who fail in their private relationships.
