Quotes from Andre Previn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The thing is that I'm naturally curious about a lot of different disciplines in music, and I enjoy doing them. And as long as people are nice enough to let me, I'll keep on trying.

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

I absolutely insist upon adequate rehearsal time - particularly for the pieces that orchestras know best. Because there, the tendency is not to take them apart - rediscover them - and you must.

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

The extraordinary mystique of hers made you think she lived on rose petals and listened to nothing but Mozart, but it wasn't true. She was quite funny and ribald. She could tell a dirty joke. She played charades with a great sense of fun and vulgarity, and she could be quite bitchy.

I don't ever consciously change gears when I play jazz or classical. It's all music.

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

I remain extraordinarily proud of the Vaughan Williams symphonies I recorded with the LSO, and in the 1980s and '90s, I made an almost complete cycle of orchestral works by Richard Strauss with the Vienna Philharmonic.

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

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

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.

There's a small group of music critics in the States who will forgive you anything - jazz, a long prison term, or what have you - anything but scoring a Hollywood musical.

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.

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.

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 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.