Joshua Bell Quotes

The beauty of a Stradivarius is that you can play in Carnegie Hall without any amplification, and it has this - the sound has, inside it, has something that projects, and it has multifaceted sound, something that kind of gets lost when you use amplification anyway.

I love pressure in a different sort of way; I enjoy the pressure of getting out and performing for the public. Being compared and judged doesn't seem quite right to me.

Music plays a huge role in the movie. The music in Star Wars, I can't imagine what the movie would have been like without it. It made the film.

I'm happy if my music is being downloaded, whether it's legally or illegally.

You're a constant student, as a musician.

After every concert, I greet young people in the lobbies. And I see a huge surge of young people playing music.

I grew up in a musical environment. My parents played music and had it playing on the radio. They brought me to a concert at the age of 5, the same age I started violin lessons.

I'm in a position where, theoretically, I could play the same ten concertos and make a very good living bouncing around playing Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky and Barber, but I really think artists should keep pushing limits and trying new things.

I like trying things, I am kind of adventurous and I like thrill seeking.

My father was - actually was an Episcopal priest as a young man. Became a psychotherapist, a psychologist. My mother is Jewish, so I grew up in a mixed background. But the common denominator was certainly music, and that was sort of emphasized in my household as music being sort of the spiritual force.

My teacher, Josef Gingold, a student of the French school, always loved the music of Saint-Saens and Henri Vieuxtemps and all the French repertoire.

The best way to refine an interpretation is by getting out and performing.

You don't have to have lots of love affairs to know what love is.

Someone who directs a film, they have to see the overall picture, and they have to get the best performances out of the actors.

When you start reading a piece together, you get a sense of someone's basic philosophy of music without saying a word. You realize the other person's approach, how they express themselves, the kind of restraint they show, all those things.

It's very hard to find a pianist that's willing to play the so-called accompanist role on part of the program and yet be capable of being a great solo pianist that you would want for the big sonatas.

In concertos, I stand up, and I conduct with the bow when I'm not playing. During symphonies, I sit, but sometimes I stop playing to conduct. Being seated in a section allows me to feel more like we're playing chamber music, which is how I like to approach it.

There are some days I take my violin out and it feels dreadful, like nothing is responding, and I want to sell it and get rid of it. And the next day suddenly the skies open up and the sound is glorious again. So it's like a relationship: There are good days and bad days.

There are some great teachers who have had great students, but they themselves can't play a note. I don't understand it, because the most I learned from my teacher was just hearing him play.

We live in a very chaotic world that sometimes we - it just seems like a mess. One of the reasons why we listen to music, and to great classical music in particular, is that everything is in an order and in a place and has a beauty that you see in nature, that you see and that people look for when they look for God.

The symphonies are the things that, as a soloist, I've not gotten to play. I used to travel the world playing concertos, and then I would sit and listen to the symphony.

In 1987, I had no idea who Steven Isserlis was. We met at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina. It was originally just an Italian summer festival, but for the past 14 years, there's also been a spring festival in America.

As far as doing TV, I do think there's a big audience out there that could enjoy classical music, but they don't know how to find it, and sometimes by doing different things ... crossover things probably make up about 5% of what I do.

It's been very exciting for me to start directing and conducting, exploring the symphonic repertoire, which I've always loved.

I happen to love Saint-Saens in general. I think he's a brilliant composer and sometimes underrated in a way because people like to pass him off as fluffy and not being serious.

Hamburgers are my favorite thing to eat, period.

My whole life, I've been watching conductors. I was 7 the first time I played with a conductor. Seeing the ones that do it well, it's an amazing thing.

I love celebrating music in different and unique ways.

We live in the least ugly time in history.

I have visited schools that have music programs and those that don't. I see the way the kids act with each other.

I think, as an artist, it's very important to continue to be challenged and feel challenged all the time.

I never had any real expectations about what sort of success I would have or all the publicity.

When you play for ticket-holders, you are already validated. I have no sense that I need to be accepted. I'm already accepted.

I've always been accused of moving around too much when I play concertos. Sometimes, conductors ask me which of us is leading.

You might think that after 40 years of practice you wouldn't need to practice anymore, but sadly it doesn't work that way. You still have to keep chugging away and perfecting.

I think - I'm always interested in reaching people in different ways, not by - not by just standing on a - randomly on a subway platform.

When you play a violin piece, you are a storyteller, and you're telling a story.

Actors want to do Shakespeare again and again, or want to do Hamlet. When you hear one guy do Hamlet and another guy do it, it's going to be a whole different experience.

I do basically what a conductor does with a baton, except I also play along with the orchestra. So I have to juggle the roles of playing the concertmaster; sometimes I drop the violin and wave my arms.

I write arrangements. I'm sort of a wannabe composer.

There was a time, early on in my career, when it was very important for me to be liked by everyone. It meant that I was musically less honest with myself.

I don't want to portray myself as a daredevil. I'm not at all.

No one tells you what to do if you completely flop at the beginning of a performance.

Music - you need the give and take from the audience, the feeling of attention. It's not about me: it's about the music itself.

If you mess up the tiniest little thing in the Beethoven concerto, or the phrasing isn't just exactly perfectly executed, Beethoven brings out the worst in the best violinist. You almost never hear a satisfying performance, because it doesn't play itself.

I started directing chamber orchestras, then adding bigger pieces, adding winds, adding small symphonies. I've always loved chamber music, and I've done a lot.

I mean, the great secret is that an orchestra can actually play without a conductor at all. Of course, a great conductor will have a concept and will help them play together and unify them.

Beethoven's fourth and seventh symphonies have a certain amount in common. Well, of course they're both written by Beethoven, but besides that, I would say their overall effect and idea is to provide the listener with an incredible sense of joy.

So many times, I've seen conductors that, every time they have a thought, they stop the orchestra and say it, and I can see the orchestra rolling their eyes and saying, 'Oh, God, he stopped again.' So there's a technique to rehearsing.

I associate music with fun and joy.

There are days that I get neurotic with the violin. Every little adjustment will change the balance for good or for bad. It's kind of a miracle, the way the whole thing works as an acoustical whole, so perfectly balanced.

The real architecture happens within the works themselves, and that was done by the composer. That's where the real skill is. In putting together a program, you're more a curator, but that's important as well. And then the interpreting of it is where our big job is.

You're really looking for the truth of what the piece is about. And that's going to be different for different people.

I think music should be the basis of an education, not just something you do once a week.

In art and music, particularly in the 20th century, there was a big period there where for something to be called profound you had to not be able to understand it.

Bach's music is really some of the greatest. I think, in some ways, Bach is the most profound composer of all.

I'm not a businessman, so I don't know how to solve the problems of the recording industry.

As far as I'm concerned, I want to do everything because life is short. So, when I did 'The Red Violin' film, I got to go to the Oscars, and I got to meet Samuel Jackson, and I got to do stuff that one wouldn't normally do in my world.

When I was 12, that's when I went to college. All my friends were 20, 21, and I was 12. It didn't even occur to me that that was strange.

Anyone who knows classical music and loves classical music has heard the Beethoven Seventh hundreds of times probably in their life.

Stradivarius, in particular, was the most amazing craftsman and one of the great artists and scientists that ever lived because he figured out something with the sound and the science of acoustics that we still don't understand it completely.

The one thing in my contract that they have backstage for me is bananas. And usually my assistant will go and get me chicken broth.

The violin sings.

I want to do everything. That's my problem.

It's interesting about classical music that the more you hear something, the more you get to know a piece, the better and better it gets, period, which is just an interesting thing on it.

Great music was written by the great geniuses, and you want to do it justice.

When I hear people clapping at the wrong times, I think that's great. We have got a listener that's not used to going to - we have got a new listener.

Being a director or a conductor is a balance of many things. And to do it right is a very difficult tightrope to walk. I've come to the conclusion that there's really no way to be one hundred percent popular as conductor.

I don't listen to a lot of music when I have my free time. But I'll go to a jazz club and have a drink and listen to a good jazz musician. Or sometimes in the morning, if I want to put myself in a good mood, I'll put on some Latin music.

I always have loved the Stradivarius. My teacher, Josef Gingold, he had a Stradivarius. As a treat, he would put it under my chin and let me play a few notes, and I remember that feeling of the overtones, the complexity of the sound. It's like a great wine.

As far as I'm concerned, the stakes are always very high. Whether it's playing at the White House or playing for a group in my own house - you know, one of those soirees I play in. Once I start playing, the stakes are somehow higher, in a way, than any of the context.

So much of performing is a mind game.

I learned early on how to make best use of my time. You know, quality is more important than quantity when it comes to practice time. And unfortunately, I still need to practice a lot.

Music teaches people to work together, which is maybe one of the most important skills.

I grew up in a musical family, but nobody was a professional musician.

Good conductors know when to let an orchestra lead itself. Ninety percent of what a conductor does comes in the rehearsal - the vision, the structure, the architecture.

I kind of alternate between conducting and playing and kind of juggling those things, but I don't use a baton.

Music is such an incredible tool for kids in general. They learn discipline; they learn how to express themselves. You learn math. You learn language. It's the ideal teaching tool, and that's why it's mind-boggling when any school superintendent decides that music is something we can kind of do without.

For some reason I can't explain, artist and musicians tend to look younger than our age. Being in music, you need this youthful sense of discovery and wonder for what you're doing and keep your imagination open. That's a youthful way of looking at life and I think that reflects in how you age.

People wrote the most beautiful things during the ugliest times.

I use Facebook quite a lot to keep up with my friends, although I had to delete 'Words With Friends' from my phone because it was wasting too much of my time.

When I do things, like, with Josh Grobin, or he has so many fans, and I get people after my concerts, classical concerts, all the time coming back and saying, 'Never heard of you until I heard the song with Josh Grobin.' Then they're now classical music fans, which is something I think we need to reach a wider audience.

Playing the Beethoven symphonies, for example, is a consummate experience for a musician because Beethoven speaks so directly to who we are as people.

I can't play on a full stomach, so I save my eating for after the concert.

I always find it funny when people say, "I don't really like classical music" or "it doesn't do anything for me." I tell them, "Well, you know, it does. You go to films and you're responding to it, and you've heard it ... " It's controlling you! So don't think you're not being affected. It's a great medium for music.