Andre Previn Quotes

You can chase a Beethoven symphony all your life and never catch up.

I run around so much that I finally reasoned that composing is the one musical endeavour which you can do anywhere, anytime.

I have a great many shortcomings, but writing for something on time has never bothered me.

Elliott Carter does not write the kind of music that the kids go off to school whistling.

There are a million things in music I know nothing about. I just want to narrow down that figure.

I've had the healthy and sobering experience of constantly working with music that is invariably better than any performance of it can be.

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 write things that are wildly abstractly atonal.

The extraordinary mystique of hers made you think she lived on rose petals and listened to nothing but Mozart, but it wasn't true. She was quite funny and ribald. She could tell a dirty joke. She played charades with a great sense of fun and vulgarity, and she could be quite bitchy.

I finally wasn't interested in writing music that played while actors talked.

When you're working with music that is invariably better than you are, it's difficult to become swell-headed.

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 don't even have a cell phone. I don't know how they work.