Famous quotes containing the words american and/or composer:
“There is not a more disgusting spectacle under the sun than our subserviency to British criticism. It is disgusting, first, because it is truckling, servile, pusillanimous—secondly, because of its gross irrationality. We know the British to bear us little but ill will—we know that, in no case do they utter unbiased opinions of American books ... we know all this, and yet, day after day, submit our necks to the degrading yoke of the crudest opinion that emanates from the fatherland.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)
“Whenever [Leonard Bernstein] entered or exited a country he would fill in on his passport form not composer or conductor, but musician. Of course people in the press spent a lot of Lenny’s life telling him what he should have done; he should have been a concert pianist, he should have composed more.... And people wouldn’t let him live his own life. But he created his own career, in his own image.”
—John Mauceri (b. 1945)