The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music; they should be taught to love it instead.

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

Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it. It would not leave them narrow-minded and bigoted.

The harmony of a concert, to which you listen with delight, must have on certain classes of minute animals the effect of terrible thunder; perhaps it kills them.

I mean jazz. I don't mean rock and roll. I mean the never-the-same-way-twice music the American black people gave the world.

There are songs that come free from the blue-eyed grass, from the dust of a thousand country roads.

Muzak pervades Las Vegas from the time you walk into the airport upon landing to the last time you leave the casinos.

Believe it or not, there are places in the world where music is important. There are places in the world where all the arts are a matter of national pride.

"Conducting" is when you draw "designs" in the nowhere-with a stick, or with your hands-which are interpreted as "instructional messages" by guys wearing bow ties who wish they were fishing.

Music is too idealistic a thing to permit itself to be bound to concrete references. You cannot have a white horse in music.