Extreme volume in music very often disguises a lack of actually important content.

And at the same time, you are of course a performer, but it's very important that you understand that your role as a performer is to get the best performance from those wonderful colleagues that you have the chance to work with.

It's kind of scary sometimes, I've seen this a lot in Asia. Children are given music lessons, very intensively I might add and involving great technical expertise sometimes, but you can tell that they have been told only to play happy pleasant music.

If we are able to get inside the music and inhabit it convincingly enough, it will cause everyone to find each other in this new psychological space. And that's most exciting.

But those musics do not address the larger kind of architecture in time that classical music does, whatever each one of us knows that classical music must mean.

Being an American musician means being adventurous.

But a large symphony orchestra basically is a repertory company and it has a very enormous repertoire and it is important for the performers to be able to know how to shift focus so that they instantly become part of the sound world that a particular repertoire demands.

When I first was conducting as guest conductor in Europe 25 years ago, I would propose doing American pieces and grudgingly it would be accepted from time to time.

Being a conductor is kind of a hybrid profession because most fundamentally, it is being someone who is a coach, a trainer, an editor, a director.

In earlier times, so many people sang much more. You know as a kid you'd go to some kind of religious training and or summer camp or whatever it was and you'd learn to sing a lot of songs.

The whole path of American music has been so much about the recognition of stylistic diversity, and the recognition of the importance of music which was from one of the vernacular traditions.

You know, they were returning to the language of the people and trying to use musical language, particularly as Copland did to create a musical language in which all Americans would feel that they had a stake.

But without the experience of actually singing or playing these things yourself, you don't have the same kind of involvement or understanding of what these musical moves mean. And that is a very big problem in addressing the future of music.

I can't do pieces I only admire technically. I have to feel some direct contact with them.

And what classical music does best and must always do more, is to show this kind of transformation of moods, to show a very wide psychological voyage. And I think that's something that we as classical musicians have underestimated.

Conductors are performers.

But some people will say you just did these programs. Well, yes, the programs are important and I'm proud of the programs, but mostly I'm proud of the way the San Francisco Symphony plays these programs.

Extreme volume in music very often disguises a lack of actually important content.

Earlier in my life, I performed a lot of music. Some of it because I felt it was a demonstration, or a representation of certain intellectual concepts that were very exciting and important.

But if I can be convinced and then through the work that we do together, the orchestra can really be convinced of the big sweep of that communication that the piece suggests, then the audience will get it and it will be a good experience for all of us.

The first year I started in San Francisco, there was an American work on every program and there's been a lot of music by living composers and gradually that was part of the process of getting the audience really to trust me.

I think music needs to be presented in a way so that kids can grasp songs, dances, simple music that's associated with some particular defining moment in human experience.

They are representations of many shared hours of collaboration between us all. That's the real nature of the relationship the orchestra and I are trying to build.

But still as compared to many, many orchestras in the world, I think you find a lot more new music and living composers on our programs than many other places.

But you know in the contemporary art world, you pose a very interesting conundrum. All sorts of people collect very contemporary art, yet when it comes to the music which is analogous to that sort of art, they are not interested, or perhaps even hostile.

Classical music is an unbroken living tradition that goes back over 1000 years and every one of those years has had something unique and powerful to say to us about what its like to be alive.

Classical music is a wonderful 1200 year old tradition that witnesses everything that it has meant and what it means right now to be human.

But those musics do not address the larger kind of architecture in time that classical music does whatever each one of us knows that classical music must mean.

If youre alive you have all the experience necessary to understand classical music.

And what classical music does best and must always do more is to show this kind of transformation of moods to show a very wide psychological voyage. And I think thats something that we as classical musicians have underestimated.

People disparage knowing and the intellectual life, and urge doing. I am content with knowing, if only I could know.

Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

Content makes poor men rich; discontent makes rich men poor.

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.

When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.

They've also, the government's decided now, what sexual content is.

Many hard comments have been made on my efforts in India from the side of the Congress party, yet I feel content in the deep conviction that the offer I traveled 22,000 miles to discuss with Indian leaders was a real contribution to a solution of our differences.

I endeavor to be wise when I cannot be merry, easy when I cannot be glad, content with what cannot be mended and patient when there be no redress.

There is no reality of consciousness independent of the effects of various vehicles of content on subsequent action (and hence, of course, on memory).

There's probably a way to use that great content and to live under the radar now and then in order to reach a new audience. That's the thinking I'm talking about.

Everything has its wonders, even darkness and silence, and I learn, whatever state I may be in, therein to be content.

While you are experimenting, do not remain content with the surface of things.

What comprises good performance? The ability through singing or playing to make the ear conscious of the true content and affect of a composition.

The problem is we need much more moral content.

Part of keeping space open is not to try to choose a form - to spend more time thinking about content, and let form take care of itself.

If we thought it would improve our relationship, we would get married tomorrow, but as it is, nearly 7 years after we got engaged, we are content to wait.

If any man claims the Negro should be content... let him say he would willingly change the color of his skin and go to live in the Negro section of a large city. Then and only then has he a right to such a claim.

Comedy is really not like any other art form in that it's very specialized and varied in it's content, but generic in it's title.

Perhaps our only sickness is to desire a truth which we cannot bear rather than to rest content with the fictions we manufacture out of each other.