Vivaldi Quotes

That's how it is, Rocamadour: in Paris we're like fungus, we grow on the railings of staircases, in dark rooms with greasy smells, where people make love all the time and then fry some eggs and put on Vivaldi records, light cigarettes ... and outside there are all sorts of things, the windows open onto the air and it all begins with a sparrow or a gutter, it rains a lot here, rocamadour, much more than in the country, and things get rusty ... we don't have many clothes, we get along with so few, a good overcoat, some shoes to keep the rain out, we're very dirty, everybody is dirty and good-looking in Paris, Rocamadour, the beds smell of night and deep sleep, dust and books underneath. ~ Julio Cortazar

And you listen to some of that meticulous Mozart stuff and Vivaldi and you realize that they knew that too. They knew when to leave one note just hanging up there where it illegally belongs and let it dangle in the wind and turn a dead body into a living beauty. ~ Keith Richards

I remember being in high school and listening to Vivaldi's 'Winter' and being so overwhelmed with emotion. ~ Sara Zarr

I found a brief piece of by Antonio Vivaldi around this time which became my 'Pinhead Mood Music'. Called Al Santo Sepolcro (At The Holy Sepulchre), it opens more like a piece of modern orchestral music, and although it it moves toward Vivaldi's familiar harmonies, there is always the threat that it will fall back into dissonance. The piece progresses in an exquisite agony, poised on a knife edge between beauty and disfigurement, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain. Perfect. ~ Doug Bradley

I think of music a lot when I paint. The theme of it to a degree is music. So instead of literally putting in music or literally putting in a musical instrument, I use only a hint of the instrument, but the brocaded pattern is like a line of Bach because of its order and the leaves going up are like passages from Vivaldi, and the emphasis on drapery is where the sound comes ... ~ Nelson Shanks

–I'll just play the notes inside my skull alone in the dark where they roam around loose. 'Cause playing like a slave, I'd just step myself straight into a hangman's noose."
On Sissieretta Jones, Jess writes: "See, Sissie would know how to let folks into one mask and out through another. She'd even raise a toast to the mask, jokin about whether folk–black and white–really believed that the opera was wearing her as a mask, or if it just tickled them to see her puttin on that white mask of Vivaldi. Was it her voice or someone else's? they'd seem to ask. Well, it was all her. Every note, in whiteface or blackface or in just plain old American, went straight down to her bones. That's what I heard when I truly listened, anyway. She'd pour those opera songs all over her body and then dress herself in the church frock of hymns. She told me one time, that in order to hear her true voice, she'd had to ask herself about her own masks. What kind of mask might I have on? she said. Because let me tell you, most don't even know they're wearing a mask. You've got to know which masks, how many masks you're wearing before you can put it down and see your true self. Those that do, they know just how to slide in and out of it, how to make the world spin inside it and out of it. How to spread their song all over that mask and make it one with the world, no matter how thick or thin the truth in that song might be. ~ Tyehimba Jess

I found myself face to face with a long line of people resembling extras off the set of Night of the Living Dead: shuffling along, pale and twitching, empty cups in hand
murderous. Miserable. No matter that the air was rich with vapors of fresh-ground beans and warm muffins; no matter that the soft piped-in Vivaldi poured over us like steamed milk. These angry zombies were rushing to work, and their eyes flashed fair warning: Don't mess with us. We haven't had our coffee. ~ Joan Frank

It was Vivaldi's Mandolin Concerto, Francesca Abraham realized as the radio alarm went off. Lively, unrelentingly upbeat, it was the perfect tempo in which to start the day. Covering her head with a pillow, she reached out blindly and urgently, desperate to shut the damn thing off. ~ Naomi Ragen

Mozart. Vivaldi. Van Gogh. Stretched their genius on struggle, stress and survival. ~ Billy Cannon

Oh don't concern yourself about that," Cassandra said earnestly. "Pandora's not going to marry at all. And I certainly wouldn't want a man who would scorn me just because my sister was a strumpet."
"I like that word," Pandora mused. "Strumpet. It sounds like a saucy musical instrument."
"It would liven up an orchestra," Cassandra said. "Wouldn't you like to hear the Vivaldi Double Strumpet Concerto in C? ~ Lisa Kleypas

When I am listening to Vivaldi or Japanese music or making spaghetti at 3 in the morning and realize that I don't have the proper sauce for it, fame is of no use. ~ Saul Leiter

What is at the higher levels of meaning consciousness is like a hyperspace in which each point is equidistant from the other and where 'the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere'? The mythologies of the occult seem like baroque music: there is an overall similar quality of sound and movement, but, upon examination, each piece of music is unique; Vivaldi and Scarlatti are similar and different. ~ William Irwin Thompson

Ritchie Blackmore was a huge early influence on me, but after that I had to find my own way ... Johann Sebastian Bach was probably the most influential guy ever on me ... Vivaldi, Beethoven and eventually Paganini ... all of a sudden I was thinking in all these other areas, instead of blues riffs ... ~ Yngwie Malmsteen

I think in Baroque music, especially in the case of Bach, what really transformed Bach's musical language, what changed it for him was hearing Vivaldi, hearing the sort of manipulation of small cells of information and patterns in order to generate sort of huge blocks of harmony. ~ Mahan Esfahani

I grew up with classical music when I was a ballet dancer. Now when I have to prepare an emotional scene, to cry or whatever, I listen to sonatas. Vivaldi and stuff. It's just beautiful to me. ~ Diane Kruger

For me, even my break time I like to pull out the bow and just go over a Vivaldi sonata and keep my head sharp, keep everything sharp. ~ Chris Wyse

I would still love to do more Handel. I think Handel was a fantastic composer. I did lots of Vivaldi, but it's also important to do the music of Handel, one of the greatest composers of the 18th century. ~ Cecilia Bartoli