Nadia Boulanger Famous Quotes
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As far as the execution is concerned ... the most frequent and most serious mistake is to follow the music instead of preceding it.
I've been a woman for a little over 50 years and have gotten over my initial astonishment. As for conducting an orchestra, that's a job where I don't think sex plays much part.
Nothing is better than music; when it takes us out of time, it has done more for us than we have the right to hope for: it has broadened the limits of our sorrowful life, it has lit up the sweetness of our hours of happiness by effacing the pettinesses that diminish us, bringing us back pure and new to what was, what will be, what music has created for us.
To study music, we must learn the rules. To create music, we must break them.
It is so much easier to rest contented with what we have already acquired than to change ever so slightly those routine but profound habits of thought and feeling which govern our life, and by which we live so blissfully. This mental inertia is, perhaps, our greatest enemy. Insidiously it leads us to assume that we can renew our lives without renewing our habits.
The art of music is so deep and profound that to approach it very seriously only is not enough. One must approach music with a serious rigor and, at the same time, with a great, affectionate joy.
Everything we know by heart enriches us and helps us find ourselves. If it should get in the way of finding ourselves, it is because we have no personality.
Never forget that your days are blessed. You may know how to profit by them, or you may not, but they are blesses.
The essential conditions of everything you do must be choice, love, passion.
Great art likes chains. The greatest artists have created art within bounds. Or else they have created their own chains.
Words created divergencies between beings, because their precise meanings put an opinion around the idea. Music only retains the highest and purest substance of the idea, since it has the privilege of expressing all, whilst excluding nothing.
A great work is made out of a combination of obedience and liberty.
You should never listen to someone practice. That is their work and theirs alone.
Always remember your days are blessed. You may know how to profit from them or you may not, but they are blessed.
[On being asked how it felt to be the first female conductor of the Boston Symphony:] I've been a woman for a little more than fifty years, and I've gotten over my original astonishment.
It is one thing to be gifted and quite another thing to be worthy of one's own gift.
Without a strong cup to carry the emotion, it is only a curiosity. Great art can come to us only in strong cups. Without emotion, there is nothing to carry.
There is nothing boring in life except ourselves.
Do not take up music unless you would rather die than not do so.
I adore tradition. I cannot stand habit. Simply to repeat is nothing, also to destroy is nothing. Tradition is never interrupted, we are always evolving but never interrupted.
False notes can be forgiven, false music cannot.
Loving a child doesn't mean giving in to all his whims; to love him is to bring out the best in him, to teach him to love what is difficult.
[On the music of Richard Strauss:] Too many notes!
Do nothing for effect. Do it for truth.
Without discipline, there can be no freedom.
Art is not emotion. Art is the medium in which emotion is expressed.
