The thing that influenced me most was the way Tommy played his trombone. . . . It was my idea to make my voice work in the same way as a trombone or violin not sounding like them, but playing the voice like those instrumentalists. – Frank Sinatra
Precisely because we do not communicate by singing, a song can be out of place but not out of character; it is just as credible that a stupid person should sing beautifully as that a clever person should do so. – W. H. Auden
The first year I started in San Francisco, there was an American work on every program and theres been a lot of music by living composers and gradually that was part of the process of getting the audience really to trust me. – Michael Tilson Thomas
