Future Symphony Institute

Wine for Beethoven was symbolic. It was something that would bring everyone around the table to eat and drink and be equals.

I remember seeing the Indian women with babies wrapped about them quietly contemplating Beethoven’s 7th.

“The only way you’re going to solve these problems is to tear down that house and build something half the size or less.”

When art goes wrong, we get a philistine welter of empty prettiness or an arid desert of conceptualism.

There will always be a type that can’t reconcile himself to the fact that classical music will always be a minority taste.

You could be sour about the music industry if you wanted to be. But the musicians’ union has a lot to answer for.

Do we really want to hear Beethoven’s Fifth as it was heard at its premiere?

Paradoxically, while our civilization grows old, it is our past that we label as aged and the day itself as eternally young.

The notion that music has properties and powers that can sharpen the mind and transform the soul is ancient.

“It’s not only the music that should be sublime – everything about Concertgebouw should be sublime.”

Organizations wanting to extract immense value from their brands must, like Wagner, work as polymaths.

Now more than ever, classical music must be protected from attacks based upon ignorance and misunderstanding.

Selling music in wrapping paper which belies its nature will inevitably lead to disappointment.

Postwar modernism and its hip progeny is pushing classical music into the corner as a “museum culture.”

They tell us only rich, old folks go to concerts these days. But that’s not how I’ve seen things.

Dave once asked me, “Why do you guys care if your audience is so old? That’s your niche.”

Will the New York Metropolitan Opera’s greatest gift to the world continue?

Denigrating the intelligence of our audience is profoundly wrongheaded.

Musicians can help by making patrons part of the family.

The present-day abundance of classical music is a testament to its deep roots in human feeling.

Persons in our time find it impossible to credit the idea of intrinsic goods.

Most thinkers of the industrial era posited it as an irreversible fact of history and progress.

The terroirist revenge was not created by wine alone and it does not apply to wine alone either.

There is a natural harmony between classical music and the principles of meta-luxury.

What modern producers seem to forget is that audiences are gifted with the faculty of imagination.

What we could do in the face of the upheaval and heartbreak of a city in turmoil?

A hall is more than a holding pen and an acoustic space.

Luxury represents a category that might necessarily exclude us. That, of course, does not describe classical music.

Nobody would give us the same amount or anything close to it for a lesser orchestra.