Peter Maxwell Davies Quotes

21 quotes in 322 categories

• An audience shouldn't listen with complacency.
• There’s no card, business card, better than a compact disc for a composer. It doesn’t half impress people and they get a long way on…
• I'm not actually teaching any more, but I am writing pieces for schools all the time, and for kids.
• If you don't get feedback from your performers and your audience, you're going to be working in a vacuum.
• At the moment, in Britain we're facing such enormous cutbacks in education programs and music programs and art programs that you feel you are knocking…
• I know what I want at least, and the older I get I think I'm better at getting it out of players and singers.
• I recently did a piece for the Boston Pops and John Williams, and I hope that it's as well a composed piece as I've ever…
• I'm obviously very keen on the theater and I think it's inevitable that some of the orchestral and chamber pieces have got dramatic elements which…
• I'm very interested, for instance, in music in education - getting young people not only to listen to, but participate in the music that I…
• If you aim at anything lower that is expecting your audience to be really alert and aware, then you're going to be caught out sooner…
• Recently I've been participating in radio and television talk programs doing broadcasts and conferences, and shooting my mouth off and really going to town.
• The establishment in Britain is certainly against the arts and against education. If something doesn't make a profit, it's invalid, and art doesn't make a…
• The present government is very insistent that business sponsorship should replace government sponsorship of the arts. Business sponsorship won't happen unless you make tax concessions,…
• You can't pander to your audience. You might in the short term, but ultimately you can't hoodwink them, either.
• You don't underestimate either players or audience in any circumstances.
• But when you get a bit older, and I hate to use the word, quite a bit more established, people take more notice and conducting…
• But you can't really know your audiences so well.
• I don't see how they can with most of my pieces, but I think it's unfortunate that they can through familiarity with flashy performances of…
• If you're writing a piece for the Boston Pops, the balance is towards one end. If you're writing a piece for a chamber music society,…
• The demands are related to their questing of the best possible out of the people concerned. It's this going for the highest possible factor that…

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