Andre Previn Quotations

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

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

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

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

I found that jazz musicians, possibly more than their classical counterparts, wear long-standing friendships easily and gracefully.

I admire Elliott Carter endlessly. But I have no ambitions to emulate him.

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

I stuck around in Hollywood for too long. I was there a long time, and when I left, I was smart enough to realise that what I was leaving was not just the movie business. I wanted to get rid of the whole atmosphere.

John Williams is, without question, talented. He writes very good scores and very good melodies and all that.

The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former the music is always graver than its performance - whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being played.

If you're going to do good work, the work has to scare you.

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

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

At MGM, you knew you were going to be working next year; you knew you were going to get paid. But I was too ambitious musically to settle for it. And I wanted to gamble with whatever talent I might have had.

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

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.

A Beethoven symphony should be rehearsed like chamber music, only for a lot more people.

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

I'm on very good terms with all my former wives.

I don't write things that are wildly abstractly atonal.