Musical Cues Quotes

I don't control it at all. It's all up to the musicians in the group. They control it. They make all the cues, and they tell me what they want, and then I act like a mirroring device so that everyone can see what the cues are.

We have two different ways of working. One is completely unstructured where somebody just starts playing and somebody joins in and then the other person joins in, and something starts to happen. That's occasionally what happens. What more often happens is that we settle on some sort of - a few sort of structural ideas, like, "Okay, when I put my finger up, we're all going to move to the extremes of our instruments. So, that means you can only play either very high or very low or both. And we're going to stay there until I take my finger down.

Conductors must give unmistakable and suggestive signals to the orchestra - not choreography to the audience.

If you ever go to a music session, you'll notice that the musicians can sit down and start playing right away, and everyone knows what to do. Of course they're reading it, but the conductor can tweak little things, and you can take that back to directing motion pictures.

I snapped my fingers all through it. Sometimes I set my own tempo during rehearsal by doing that.

The singing tells everybody what to do musically.

There are certain sounds that have a loaded past. Like the sound of a harp, if you go back to old movies, represents a dream sequence; it transports you there.

Two or three notes of music can instantly make you feel sad or tense or afraid or angry. To do that in words is much more difficult.

I hate being manipulated by song. Don't tell me what I should be feeling. I don't want cellos or violins to be telling me that I should be bawling right now.