Creativity Quote by Kurt Masur

Masur is describing conducting as a kind of radical listening, not a dictatorship with a baton. The line pushes back on the romantic myth of the maestro who imposes a singular “vision” no matter who’s onstage. For Masur, the real craft is adaptability: you arrive with a score and an interpretation, then you let the living instrument in front of you revise it.

“You have to change your mind” is the loaded phrase. It sounds like humility, but it’s also a demand for intelligence and speed. Changing your mind doesn’t mean being wishy-washy; it means reading an ensemble’s grain the way a good editor reads a writer’s voice. Every orchestra carries institutional memory: what they’ve played, which traditions they’ve inherited, how they breathe together, what they fear, what they’re proud of. A Viennese string section and an American one may “play the same notes,” but their default vibrato, attack, and sense of rhetorical timing can be worlds apart. Masur’s point is that forcing one uniform approach flattens those differences into correctness.

The subtext is political, too, in a soft way. Masur’s career bridged East and West, and his leadership in Leipzig was famously anchored in civic responsibility. He treats the orchestra not as obedient labor but as a community with a personality. The best authority, he implies, is relational: earned by responsiveness. In an era that still markets conductors as brands, Masur’s sentence is almost anti-branding. It argues that great music-making is less about personal monument-building than about meeting the room you’re in and letting it change you.