Classical Musicians Quotes

Classical musicians do this all the time. They want perfection. So they piece things together. Eight bars of this and six bars of that. Glenn Gould said that with a recording he wanted to make perfect versions of pieces. ~ John Abercrombie

My brother had a house in Paris. To it came many Western classical musicians. These musicians all made the same point: 'Indian music,' they said, 'is beautiful when we hear it with the dancers. On its own, it is repetitious and monotonous.' ~ Ravi Shankar

Many classical musicians lack pulse and rhythmical strength and precision, so for us it was very important to acquire and learn those. ~ Luka Sulic

Kolkata is a musical city. What I like about people here is the lack of diplomacy. Some of the best Indian classical musicians belong to this place. Kolkatans do not go by fashion, but by passion. ~ Sukhwinder Singh

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. ~ Michael Tilson Thomas

You see it in jazz musicians, who never rehearse exactly what they do, but just seem to know when to take center stage, when to fade into the background. When jazz artists were compared with classical musicians in brain function, they showed more neural indicators of self-awareness.15 As one jazz artist put it, In jazz you have to tune in to how your body is feeling so you know when to riff. ~ Daniel Goleman

A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians. ~ Frank Zappa

I think the other thing that's important is getting to a place, which very, very rarely happens with improvising groups, where somebody can decide not to play for a while. You watch any group of musicians improvising together and they nearly all play nearly all the time. In fact I often say that the biggest difference between classical music and everything else is that classical musicians sometimes shut up because they're told to, because the score tells them to. Whereas any music that's sort of based on folk or jazz, everybody plays all the time. ~ Brian Eno

I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means 'put down'. ~ Bob Newhart

My gaze returns to earth and when it does, it's her eyes I see. Not the way I used to see them - around every corner, behind my own closed lids at the start of each day. Not in the way I used to imagine them in the eyes of every other girl I laid on top of. No, this time it really is her eyes. A photo of her, dressed in black, a cello leaning against one shoulder like a tired child. Her hair is up in one of those buns that seem to be a requisite for classical musicians. She used to wear it up like that for recitals and chamber music concerts, but with little pieces hanging down, to soften the severity of the look. There are no tendrils in this photo. I peer closer at the sign. YOUNG CONCERT SERIES PRESENTS MIA HALL. ~ Gayle Forman

My love of classical hit pretty early. I was 13 when it occurred, and that was really the only music I listened to for many, many years. I went to a conservatory, but I always knew I would be in the pop world, because A) it was more fun and B) you didn't have to practice as much and you could go out more. But I immediately saw this opportunity to inject my material with these sounds that most members of my generation really didn't know about, so it was a great way to differentiate myself from the pack. ~ Rufus Wainwright

Only a small percentage of novelists, painters, musicians, scientists, anywhere in the world, are talented. But there are many more in Hollywood than one would expect from looking movies. ~ Hortense Powdermaker

I've always written about people who have very abstracted in a certain way. I write about scientists and artists and musicians. I write about people who live in their heads who are very obsessed about a certain set of details in the physical world. ~ Andrea Barrett

I think that what trips up a lot of great musicians is that they become involved with too many things that aren't where their strengths lie. ~ Will Oldham

It was the transmutation of the classical liberal intellectual foundation by Christianity that gave modern Europe its impetus and that pushed European accomplishment so far ahead of all other cultures and civilizations around the world. ~ Charles A. Murray

If you're going to use standards as criteria for signing musicians, you can sign thousands. If you're going to use some sort of conceptual interpretation that's based on the tradition of those standards, but is trying to move away from it, you're down to about 10 people or so. ~ Branford Marsalis

Many, many years ago, I was one of the few conductors who talked to the audience and now a lot of classical conductors have figured it out ... otherwise, you just get the back of someone's head playing music you could hear on a CD. It's not enough anymore. ~ Marvin Hamlisch

A lot of the musicians asked me if when I hit my high-Cs on the records I had a clarinet take the notes. Some [thought] I had invented some kind of gadget so I could play high register. They weren't satisfied until they handed me a trumpet that they had with them and had me swing it. Then they cheered. ~ Louis Armstrong

It was more about getting together with other musicians and playing live. I needed to suss out a full set [for the Last Summer tour], and I didn't want to play Fiery Furnaces material. So half of our set was new songs that we ended up recording for this album. And that made such a huge difference - going into the studio after playing a song for two years, knowing it inside-out and having sung it millions of times, and then recording it is a totally satisfying experience. You're suddenly in this controlled environment and you can make it sound exactly as you've been imagining it. ~ Eleanor Friedberger

Love is like a classical melody." Shallan grinned. "If you end your performance too quickly, your audience is disappointed? ~ Anonymous

The classical music industry, has been an industry of covers. So we do covers, and if I compare this with the rock and pop side, what is the most exciting event? ~ Esa-Pekka Salonen

The King walks. He nods. His glance is like God's touch - under it all things spring to life. A wave of his hand and a hundred musicians tear into the Handel, making a sound you've never heard before, and never will again. A sound that goes through you, through flesh and bone, and reorders the very beat of your heart. ~ Jennifer Donnelly

This goes out to all the Rag Tags and the negative shits and anyone else who resents people who have the courage to follow their dreams, and not only that but to show their dreams to somebody else.

The planet needs more writers, artists and musicians. More tattooed storytellers.

Why so many people seem to resent the storyteller is beyond me. We're not raging against the machine, but we do want the opportunity to show our art to as many people as possible. What's so wrong with that?

And believe it or not, we won't go away. ~ Karl Wiggins

I think that artists and musicians can do as much harm as good for causes if they tie their names to lots of things, especially if they aren't really doing much to meaningfully push their causes forward. ~ Damian Kulash

Music was around in my family in two ways. My mother would occasionally sing to me, but I was mostly stimulated by the classical music my father had left behind. I had an ear for music, I suppose, so that's what began my interest in music. ~ Tom Glazer

A tremor of apprehension encircled the room. None of the ladies required any preparation to pronounce on a question of morals; but when they were called ethics it was different. The club, when fresh from the "Encyclopedia Brittanica," the "Reader's Handbook" or Smith's "Classical Dictionary," could deal confidently with any subject; but when taken unawares it had been known to define agnosticism as a heresy of the Early Church and Professor Froude as a distinguished histologist; and such minor members as Mrs. Leveret still secretly regarded ethics as something vaguely pagan. ~ Edith Wharton

Musicians tend to get bored playing the same thing over and over, so I think it's natural to experiment. ~ Dimebag Darrell

As a recording engineer - someone who is deeply embroiled in the process of making records every day - you see trends and fads run through the social organization of the population of musicians in the same way that they would run through a high school. ~ Steve Albini

I remember once I asked Wayne for the time," Miller told Mercer. "He started talking to me about the cosmos and how time is relative." Miller and [Wayne] Shorter were waiting somewhere -- an airport, a train station, a hotel. The band's keyboardist, Joe Zawinul, who took charge of such matters as what the road crew was supposed to do and when, set Miller straight. "You don't ask Wayne shit like that," he snapped. "It's 7:06 p.m." [p.1] ~ Ben Ratliff

I'm very unstable; there's no stability in a musician's life at all. You live on a bus or on the road hand to mouth and you don't know where your money's coming from. ~ James Taylor

I do not play to musicians. I play to the people. ~ Dick Dale

But in these modern times it may be decidedly asserted as a fact, that vice, in accomplishing the vast majority of its seductions, uses no disguise at all; appears impudently in its naked deformity; and, instead of horrifying all beholders, in accordance with the prediction of the classical satirist, absolutely attracts a much more numerous congregation of worshippers than has ever yet been brought together by the divinest beauties that virtue can display for the allurement of mankind. ~ Wilkie Collins

Quantum mechanics broke the mold of the previous framework, classical mechanics, by establishing that the predictions of science are necessarily probabilistic. ~ Brian Greene

We're not spokespeople, we're musicians. ~ Ed O'Brien

Often, equipment can as easily function as a security blanket for musicians unwilling or unable to risk anything personal in the studio. Whether one catches the feeling on a record is a subjective matter. How can you be sure? The machinery can hold out the promise of at least mechanical perfection. ~ Jon Landau

There's a great energy and drive that takes precedence in a lot of rock and pop. It's about making a strong visceral connection. That's something that I think great classical music can have, too. ~ Joshua Roman

Theatre probably originated without texts, but by the time we get to the classical Greek period, theatre has become text-based. ~ Tom Stoppard

I love classical music and have been playing violin since I was seven. Music helps me to express feelings in a way words often cannot. ~ Jane Chen

I kind of lost interest in the classical dance. I was very much interested in the modern choreography. ~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

I'm primarily thought of as a rocker, and certainly 'Frankenstein' had a very dramatic power rock image. It was almost a precursor of heavy metal and fusion. But I also love jazz and classical and if there's one common thread that runs through all my music, it is blues. ~ Edgar Winter

This weird thing that musicians have ... it's got something to do with approval, and not feeling good enough, and therefore going out and being great somehow makes your life valid. ~ Glen Hansard

The true beauty of music is that it connects people. It carries a message, and we, the musicians, are the messengers. ~ Roy Ayers

Musicians burn through more cash than the Federal Reserve. ~ Shawn Amos

A lot of musicians put diamonds on things to show they had money. I on the other had felt that Daytona showed I had style and I didn't need to be flashy. ~ Brian McKnight

Tossed into the Secaucus graveyard are about 25 centuries of classical culture and the standards of style, elegance and grandeur that it gave to the dreams and constructions of Western man. That turns the Jersey wasteland into a pretty classy dump. ~ Ada Louise Huxtable

This is called the Great Snow Dance and it is done every year in Narnia on the first moonlit night when there is snow on the ground. Of course it is a kind of game as well as a dance, because every now and then some dancer will be the least little bit wrong and get a snowball in the face, and then everyone laughs. But a good team of dancers, Dwarfs, and musicians will keep it up for hours without a single hit. On fine nights when the cold and the drum-taps, and the hooting of the owls, and the moonlight, have got into their wild, woodland blood and made it even wilder, they will dance till daybreak. I wish you could see it for yourselves. ~ C.S. Lewis

I'm an engineer. I see myself as a toolmaker and the musicians are my customers ... They use my tools. ~ Robert Moog

The Red Comyns had always done well behind the throne. The king was but an instrument, as his father used to say. They were the musicians. ~ Robyn Young

I still play jazz, and I've always got that trumpet very handy, but I'm coming to feel the classical venues are where my main focus is, in the realm of symphonic pops. ~ Doc Severinsen

The Oxford Classical Dictionary firmly states: "No word in either Greek or Latin corresponds to the English 'religion' or 'religious.' "6 The idea of religion as an essentially personal and systematic pursuit was entirely absent from classical Greece, Japan, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Iran, China, and India.7 Nor does the Hebrew Bible have any abstract concept of religion; and the Talmudic rabbis would have found it impossible to express what they meant by faith in a single word or even in a formula, since the Talmud was expressly designed to bring the whole of human life into the ambit of the sacred.8 ~ Karen Armstrong

I live in Topanga Canyon, which is like a faux-rustic enclave in Los Angeles. I love the sounds of all the critters outside - the frogs, owls, crickets, and birds. Some of the birds around here are pretty accomplished musicians. You can learn a lot from them. ~ Cliff Martinez

The oft-repeated assertion that Islam "preserved" classical knowledge and then graciously passed it on to Europe is baseless. Ancient Greek texts and Greek culture were never "lost" to be somehow "recovered" and "transmitted" by Islamic scholars, as so many academic historians and journalists continue to write: these texts were always there, preserved and studied by the monks and lay scholars of the Greek Roman Empire and passed on to Europe and to the Islamic empire at various times. ~ Darío Fernández-Morera

The hardest thing with musicians is getting them not to play. ~ Prince

That was what he wanted to tell his audience at Cambridge. He divided classical satirists into two classes - fierce men starving in garrets, and renouncing popularity and circulation to dwell in tubs, and calm good-livers "who tell amusingly the kind of truth that no one has ever denied." But for the present century the right spirit, he believed, was self-satire, the ability to see humor in the constant small defeats of life, and "the power to be startled by nothing, however extravagant." The subject, in the end, turned out to be more relevant than it had seemed, as anyone could have told who had heard Eddie and Wilfred laughing together. ~ Penelope Fitzgerald

Great musicians, you don't just hear them, you feel them. When I listen to Randy Rhoads, I feel every note. I learned a lot from him. ~ Zakk Wylde

The greatest temptation for the like of us is: to renounce violence, to repent, to make peace with oneself. Most revolutionaries fell before this temptation, from Spartacus to Danton and Dostoevsky; they are the classical form of betrayal of the cause. The temptations of God were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan. As long as chaos dominates the world, God is an anachronism; and every compromise with one's own conscience is perfidy. When the accursed inner voice speaks to you, hold your hands over your ears ... . ~ Arthur Koestler