Classical Music Quotes by Jillian Hervey, Brad Paisley, Planningtorock, Serj Tankian, Joshua Bell, Benjamin Carson and many others.
I’m sure there are a few things in my CD collection that might surprise people. I like classical music, the blues, and I’m a big fan of alternative rock.
I’ve worked with some great orchestras and amazing classical musicians, but I don’t like the conceptualization of classical music as an elitist form of art.
I was able to turn to classical music many people, and this is one of the nicest achievements I can have.
I’d been trained as a classical musician, but also as a pop musician. My teacher made sure that everything was available.
It’s not that people don’t like classical music. It’s that they don’t have the chance to understand and to experience it.
Any form of classical music is made for youth.
I come from a very strenuous, strict, disciplined classical music background. My grandfather, noted Carnatic classical exponent Dr. Sripada Pinakapani, was a Padma Bhushan recipient.
New music is absolutely integral to classical music.
I love classical music. It’s my stabiliser.
As a kid, I loved classical music. Composers like Beethoven were like rock stars to me. Then there were the real rock stars: The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, and Bob Dylan.
‘The Shining‘ is operatic and sensational and… really shocking. It has this amazing meld of classical music and modern interpretations of classical music, and incredible imagery. From the set design to the costumes, there’s so much to unpack.
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.
I think for a classical musician the goal is the same as an electronic musician. A very good professional classical musician must not think about technique.
I love classical music. Yes, I was in a conservatory when I was younger and played guitar and all that stuff, so I also love rock.
One of the struggles that I have with classical music is the way one thinks about a recapitulation. There’s always this idea of themes, and I have trouble with that.
I was interested in both Western and Indian classical music.
Classical music only really came into my life in 1969. I wish I had heard classical music and church music when I was a teenager or even as a child.
Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky were not classical musicians while they were alive and active, they were the rock stars of their day.
I am a trained singer in Hindustani and classical music.
I love classical music. I love a lot of musicians playing together and the whole culture of that, whether it’s Indian or it’s Western.
What I do for migraines when I get them, I listen to classical music, and I turn it up really loud.
It was not a secret, then or now, that there is something vaguely un-American about forcing your child to be really good at classical music performance.
At a certain point, I became a kind of musician that has tunnel vision about jazz. I only listened to jazz and classical music.
You don’t need any specialized education and you don’t need to know anything about the world in which I work. I think my music should be able to speak to you even if you’ve never been to a concert of classical music before.
I don’t really have a career as a jazz musician. I don’t really have a career as a classical musician. I don’t really have a career as a college professor, and yet I did all those things and I did them well. I put out some records in the 1980’s and 1990’s that changed the way some trumpet players played.
I would not want the limitations held by the name of a classical musician. I want many people to enjoy my music much beyond just classical music fans. I think the term, ‘violinist,’ keeps me distant from the audience. I want to communicate with them more.
Lately I’ve been listening to some classical music again, some jazz.
It’s wonderful doing concerts in places like New York and London, but I feel a responsibility to also bring my work home, to bring world-class, classical music to Somerset.
I studied classical music in high school.
I studied classical music in the Conservatory of Paris.
If Music is a Place — then Jazz is the City, Folk is the Wilderness, Rock is the Road, Classical is a Temple.
I listen to classical music very much. There’s a lot of jazz that I don’t enjoy listening to.
I grew up in a family that was very musical, learned the blues and everything like that. And I became a little bit frustrated with the simplicity of rock n’ roll and blues. I started listening to a lot of classical music – mainly Bach, Vivaldi.
If you’re alive, you have all the experience necessary to understand classical music.
I’m trained in classical music, and my favourites have always been rock n’ roll and blues, but I’ve grown up with different kinds of music around me because of my parents.
In the ballet studio, it was such an organized and disciplined environment, like I’d never had in my life. Seeing myself in the mirror, surrounded by the classical music, that’s when I started to fall in love with dance.
Europe in general is a great place for me, but specifically Germany has been very good to me. Germans love classical music… Electronic dance music is massive over there, so I’m kind of the marriage between the two.
Contrary to popular opinion, classical music does not have to be enjoyed amid exclusive circles, there need not be any snobbishness attached to it. It’s there for everyone. I play for the people.
My family were all into classical music, and I found that very intimidating.
For me, it’s classical music I started with and I admire Jacqueline du Pre.
I think classical music tuition is, well, was when I was a child, was an abomination. I think in some ways it is one of life’s great tragedies for everybody who gives up an instrument.
I grew up with a lot of classical music around.
I wanted to make an album where every song is kind of interacting – where you can’t tell what’s the string arrangement and what’s the song. I guess that came out of going to college, majoring in music, studying classical music, and even as a kid, being really drawn to classical music.
The beautiful thing about ‘Bhav’ is that it reaches out to a far more number than just the typical set of people who say they like classical music and dance.
The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former the music is always graver than its performance – whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being played.
I had great inspiration from a Japanese composer named Toru Takemitsu. He wrote over 90 film scores and a lot of concert music, a lot of classical music, and he gave me a lot of inspiration, as well as composers from other countries.
I like classical music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and I adore Bach above all.
Musical themes developing is a lot of what classical music is based on, and exposition and recapitulation – these kinds of things I find oppressive.
I grew up with classical music, and to a lesser extent electronic music, and that’s where I belong, so to speak.
I’m actually doing what I like doing, which is mixing opera music and classical music with soul and folk. And I was writing and talking about what I’ve actually experienced, and I don’t think that’s very common.
If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.
For me, electronic music is the classical music of the 21st century.
I grew up as a dancer, and music and dance are so closely tied that in ballet class, you’re listening to all this classical music, and in modern class, you’re working with a live drummer. It was something that always made me feel really comfortable, and I’ve had a connection to since the beginning.
Way back in the old days, say in Europe of the Middle Ages, you had an aristocracy, and they could afford to pay for musicians. The kings and queens had musicians in the castles, and that developed into symphony orchestras and what we call “Classical music” now.
Why waste money on psychotherapy when you can listen to the B Minor Mass?
Indian classical music is in my blood.
Jazz is not the popular culture. Jazz is in the same position in our culture as classical music. A very small minority of people really love it.
The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music they should be taught to love it instead.
I did classical music when I was a teenager, but the experience of performing a classical concert felt too frighteningly pristine for me to continue with it.
That mainstream English is essential to our self-preservation is indisputable . . . but it is not necessary to abandon Spoken Soul to master Standard English, any more than it is necessary to abandon English to learn French or to deprecate jazz to appreciate classical music.
A lot of people may not know how competitive it is to play classical music, because when you think about it, the music that you’re playing is music that’s been here for years. And all you’re trying to do is improve upon it when you play.
There is this tremendous amount of arrogance and hubris, where somebody can look at something for five minutes and dismiss it. Whether you talk about gaming or 20th century classical music, you can’t do it in five minutes. You can’t listen to ‘The Rite of Spring’ once and understand what Stravinsky was all about.
I’ve been listening to quite a lot of classical music like Erik Satie, and quite a lot of blues.
I would like for people to not be stuck by the rules of what is expected of a classical musician. If you really want to do something different, don’t be afraid to do so. Think of music itself and not the rules or expectations of people.
The musical instuments may be western but my voice never wavers away from my own ragas. it is good to make experiments and I do a lot of them but my thoughts always round the centre and that centre is the tradition of my elders and it is classical music…
I listen mostly to classical music.
I was born out of classical music.
To sing is to pray twice.
I had 12 years of classical music as a child, playing piano competitions as a teenager, playing in blues bands and rock ‘n’ roll bands, country and jazz bands. I played in about any situation.
Popularity gets up people’s noses. But I understand the importance and the function of popular music. There is an artistic purpose. Popular music helps people to develop a curiosity and leads them towards classical music.
I was introduced to classical music by my grandparents – my parents were mostly into folk and jazz. Even as a young man, I was literally unaware of the distinctions between any of that, and I still think it’s pointless.
I am not doing something that it is experimental music in relation to classical music.
I think there are people who use classical music to say, ‘I am better than you, because I know all the rules and you don’t.’ You’re not allowed to have fun or entertain.
I definitely want to act, but I also want to score movies, and I have this idea to fuse classical music with other styles that would give it a different perception.
I grew up listening to a lot of classic jazz, and stuff like The Beatles, and old Motown stuff, and a lot of classical music. I just loved all of that.
I became a professional musician and played all kinds of music. I played bluegrass, I played classical music, and for many years, I played jazz.
I play a lot of classical music around the house.
I was raised in an Indian household – singing classical music and eating south Indian food. But the second I went to school, it was a different world. I’d be listening to Destiny‘s Child, Usher and the Backstreet Boys. It wasn’t until college that I really found the balance between the two worlds.
We Gonna Win’ is a song of triumph, It represents my personal belief that with hard work, talent and dedication, everything is possible. It’s a one of a kind marriage between rap and classical music, where the music doesn’t accompany the vocalist, but rather stands on its own.
I did a pop album, ‘Sogno,’ in 1999. I think it’s important to record another pop album because many people love pop music. By this kind of repertoire, some people can later discover classical music.
The classical music world is so snobbish.
We have always played classical music and always loved dance and pop music.
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.
Music is the shorthand of emotion.
I’ve got a lot of things that are probably obvious, not much outside the box right now. But, I have been listening to a lot of classical music lately for some reason. I used to do that a lot when I was doing cabinet making in New England. I’ve sort of returned to that for some reason. That might be surprising to people.
The Zombies were really unique – they had elements of jazz and classical music in their songs and songwriting. They had a very, very different sound compared to a lot of their contemporaries at the time.
I loved Queen, Journey, Fleetwood Mac, and people like Barbara Streisand. The thing with me is that classical music was also an inspiration. I took piano lessons at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels for 10 years.
Basically my influences have been American influences. It’s been blues, gospel, swing era music, bebop music, Broadway show music, classical music.
I had to listen to the classical music because it calms me down, calms my nerves down.
I have a classical music background. I studied violin and trumpet.
Although I enjoyed writing Film Music it was always a means to an end, in that it enabled me to keep a wife and family and write my classical music, which has always been my passion.
Everybody loves classical music they just don’t know about it yet.
I was surrounded by classical music, art and ballet all these things. But they also had a football field and it was at the conservatoire I decided to be a footballer.
It is interesting that our biggest fans are the greatest names of the classical music scene, such as Julian Rachlin, Janine Jansen, Mischa Maisky and Gidon Kremer. They even make guest appearances in our concerts occasionally.
My mom was an opera singer. She did all the classical music, and I heard it. I know every opera. I know every classical piece of music.
What I wanted to do was music, until I was about 16. But it was jazz and rock, never classical music.
A musicologist is a man who can read music but cannot hear it.
Its a small community, the classical music community, along with the excitement of new places and new things and this feeling of being at home wherever you go because thats where your community is.
Part of my mission is simply that: to bring the world of the arts, particularly classical music, closer to people so they don’t feel that it is something remote that they have to specially prepare themselves for, or dress up for.
Classical music has been based on works people love and come back to for aural comfort.
I’m pretty optimistic about the future of rock… it will be back to composition as in classical music or jazz.
Music has always been transnational; people pick up whatever interests them, and certainly a lot of classical music has absorbed influences from all over the world.
I had a lot of classical influences. I had classical music and opera and literature, but I also liked sleaze. And putting it together, sleaze and glamour, it just made sense to me.
What passion cannot music raise and quell!
If we have to put music into baskets, then the progressive rock bands I fell in love with as a teenager made sounds that shaded into jazz, folk, metal, and in the case of the wonderful (and sadly missed) Jon Lord, modern classical music.
I enjoy practicing law too much to even contemplate retiring, but I often think about engaging in serious study of the history of art, of the intricacies of classical music. I could write a fugue, or perhaps learn to play the cello.
It is the responsibility of music composers to add some classical music elements into their songs to make the music genre popular.
I have been exposed to different kinds of Marathi and Hindi music, classical music, and English songs since childhood.
It’ll help you be imaginative if you listen to classical music. It helps you understand dynamics and how important they are to create an environment.
I don’t mind being classified as a jazz artist, but I do mind being restricted to being a jazz artist. My foundation has been in jazz, though I didn’t really start out that way. I started in classical music, but my formative years were in jazz, and it makes a great foundation.
I grew up with the Woodstock generation. I went to Woodstock, and like everybody in my school, I wanted to be in a rock-and-roll band, and most of us were. But I also grew up with a lot of piano lessons and a lot of classical music training.
My mother was an opera singer and my grandmother a concert pianist, and they only liked classical music. If I put on a pop record, they would tell me to turn it off, so I only listen to classical.
In classical music, love is based on bitin’ — imitation. It’s not based on interpretation. A jazz musician, if he plays someone else’s song, has a responsibility to make a distinct and original statement.
Music in Africa is perceived so differently than Western classical music – it’s language and storytelling.
Classical music is for listening but rock and roll is to have fun with.
We need to bring music to the people, even to those who normally do not listen to classical music.
I started playing music when I was about six and didn’t discover Indian classical music until I was fifteen. So, essentially, I had a lot of catching up to do.
I also have a big love of classical music played on piano because this is the environment I grew up in my brother being one of the great masters in this world.
Influences at home, including classical music, were not all specifically jazz, but the family radio was always on… So there was always some connection to American culture, to American music.
For me, personally, the most interesting music comes from the popular sector – from film and pop music – since contemporary classical music got stuck and went into directions where it lost a lot of the public by over-intellectualizing.
I play only classical music. My pianos are my only big indulgence, but they’re a necessity. When I’m playing the piano is literally the only time I can be completely abstract and disconnected from the regular world and yet be connected – to my music.
I thought it would be interesting to play classical music on rock instruments.
Classical musicians go to the conservatories, rockВґn roll musicians go to the garages.
As a kid, I would listen to anything that had a live orchestra or ensemble playing, so that covered everything from show tunes to eclectic jazz things to film soundtracks to classical music. They’re all inspiring to me.
There is nothing else is India which is as popular as Bollywood. Look at Indian classical music, how big and how respected it is in the West, but here in India, no one is interested.
Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.
Listening to classical music is like reading philosophy books. Not everybody has to do it.
The Beatles are the classical music of rock n’ roll. And rock n’ roll is far more widespread than classical will ever be.
Jazz is America’s classical music.
I grew up with classical music blasting in my parents’ living room and my older brother‘s practicing saxophone in his room listening to jazz… a beautiful chaos.
Classical music can rock you!
Until I was around 12 or 13, I only listened to classical music, mostly Tchaikovsky. But around that age, I started listening to Iron Maiden, and that’s when I purchased my first guitar, a pearl-white Westone.
I finished my university studies with classical music while being in a successful metal band, but that was not an easy task at all.
There are three virtuous styles of music; classical, jazz and heavy metal. I do love classical music but I don’t listen to it much anymore and I never listen to metal, so I am not very interested in music that is difficult to play.
I’ve got this diverse education, growing up in classical music and existing between that and music that is more visceral, so for sure, I’ve always been interested in music from other cultures.
I like to listen to classical music… I like mainline jazz.
I love classical music and often listen to symphonies or opera in the morning.
Just going to Bangladesh was an experience… if you go into small villages in the U.K., they’re backward and culturally devoid. But if you go into small villages in Bangladesh, they have classical music concerts.
I guess some people in classical music can keep going until they kick (die) and the (Rolling) Stones are definitely pushing the envelope but I wonder if here’s a time when you have to face whether you are as good as you used to be.
Part of what I enjoy about writing classical music is communicating through the score and collaborating with such amazing musicians.
Western classical music is participative. Look at the number of people who are involved in a symphony.
Don’t be a perfectionist… leave that to the classical musicians.
Classical music is far from boring – it has all the blood, energy, the sinister dark side, rhythm that rock music has, and all the refined, subtle sensuality that one can ask for
The classical music is soothing and stimulating, good for thinking.
When I was young, I played the piano and studied classical music and jazz. I wanted to be a concert pianist, and if I’d devoted myself to it, I could have been. But it would have been too much work and a very lonely life.
You cannot go wrong by learning classical music because it trains the ear.
The choreography in films is completely different. I find it easier when I am asked to dance to classical music, but it’s a different ball game altogether.
I’m a self-taught guitarist, but I have a classical music background.
My basic grammar is in Indian classical music, Carnatic music, and Hindustani music, but I don’t believe that that is the only form of music I will learn. I don’t believe in that, because I am a very open minded person.
My influences are jazz, blues, European classical music; they are rock music and pop music. So many kinds of music. World music from different countries like India and China. I think that would be a shame not to take advantage and do something… not unique, because I don’t have this pretension.
For me, I’m way more at home in heavy metal than I am in classical music.
I love classical music, but I hated classical guitar. But I like flamenco, because there was something else there going on. It wasn’t just the notes being thrown at you. And there were certain kinds of jazz that I really liked and other kinds that just went right over my head.
I like to listen to a lot of classical music when I’m painting, the most simplistic stuff I can find. I like simple piano.
Most of the music I’ve become interested in is hybrid in its originsClassical music, of course, is unbelievably hybrid. Jazz is an obvious amalgam. Bluegrass comes from eighteenth-century Scottish and Irish folk music that made contact with the blues. By exploring music, you’re exploring everything.
My parents are both musicians and made sure we all played music. My brothers and sisters all play instruments, so we’ll get together whenever we can and play. We play a lot of classical music – you know, the good stuff.
For people who live their lives in classical music the Three Tenors is a kind of benign tumor: unsightly but not life threatening.
[Phil Wood] knew about wine. He knew about food. He knew about art. He knew about classical music. He was interested in things.
I loved ‘Fantasia‘ as a kid because it filled me with wonder, enchantment and awe. It was my first real introduction into classical music. It was totally inspiring to me.
I think sometimes when you speak about something like ‘Indian classical music’ and ‘ragas,’ and all of that’s new to people, it can be quite intimidating, in the same way that I have sometimes found opera and Wagner intimidating – one doesn’t know where to begin sometimes.
Inspiration is an awakening, a quickening of all man’s faculties, and it is manifested in all high artistic achievements.
Classical music is a special taste like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand.
The peculiar characteristic of classical music is that it is really better than it sounds.
At the age when Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry, I was listening to European classical music.
I had this exceptional classical music voice. If I’d followed a true path for my talent, I would have ended up being an opera singer.
Seriously though, my father was the first African American to sign a contract with the Metropolitan Opera so I grew up with classical music and jazz in the home all the time.
I don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to.
I think it’s time they knew the truth about Beethoven.
Classical music is something that we’re very passionate about, but we always thought it was presented in a stuffy way.
I like classical music. I especially like the French composers: Ravel in particular. Debussy. That’s so soothing in a nervous world.
It’s America’s classical music … this becomes our tradition … the bottom line of any country in the world is what did we contribute to the world? … we contributed Louis Armstrong
Why a musician loves playing jazz or classical music or what makes them happy, and why an artist likes to paint – it’s so hard to actually put into words what that feeling is of joy that we get, but that is what I get: a feeling of joy when the camera is rolling, even if I’m doing something that is not joyous.
I had spent many years pursuing excellence, because that is what classical music is all about… Now it was dedicated to freedom, and that was far more important.
You know how some people seem to think that their love for classical music makes them spiritual or at least something quite special? And others who think you are a monster if you don’t ‘love children,’ however obnoxious the children may be? Well, I found out that many people who love flowers look down on those who don’t.
I’ve always been heavily influenced by classical music, mostly by baroque music.
In contrast, traditional classical music starts from an abstract musical schema. This is then notated and only expressed in concrete sound as a last stage, when it is performed.
I love listening to classical music.
Even the most jingoistic person would have to admit that even American cultural music comes from Europe. That’s what classical music is, real European music.
Being a classical musician, you’re doing many things anyway. One day you’re doing Bach concerto and the next you’re doing some avant-garde thing. It’s just another hat that I’m allowed to wear.
So, if I ever find myself hankering for the long, respectful silences of the olden days, I remind myself that classical music broadcasting was a whisker away from becoming one long silence itself.
Classical music can be catchy, so can African instrumental guitar music. It’s not just pop songs that are catchy. Rhythms can be catchy, too.
Another classical music teacher from Performing Arts that I’ve stayed in contact with is Jonathan Strasser.
I just loved classical music, but I also loved playing rock guitar, and I loved playing piano, so it was a natural thing that those things would merge at some point.
My father was a classical musician and my mother was a writer.
I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First to discourage the composer from writing any more and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven.
I started making music with my band in the ’80s, so I am more product of post punk than classical music, and I have always carried on this way.
Our audience, it has been a more difficult process for classical music audiences around the world, and I’m not completely certain why.
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.
My greatest influence came from my parents’ love of classical music. We listened to a lot of arias and operas growing up.
For me, let’s keep jazz as folk music. Let’s not make jazz classical music. Let’s keep it as street music, as people’s everyday-life music. Let’s see jazz musicians continue to use the materials, the tools, the spirit of the actual time that they’re living in, as what they build their lives as musicians around.
Growing up in a family that listened to almost nothing but classical music had its effects, as well. “California Гњber Alles,” the first Dead Kennedys single, was inspired musically more by Japanese Kabuki than anything else.
My whole childhood was filled with classical music and going to concerts of the New York Philharmonic and other New York ensembles and organizations, but interestingly, I didn’t become conscious of wanting to be a musician until I was about 11. I was a rather late starter.
I wasn’t listening to that much classical music – not much more than anything else. I was really lucky to have parents who loved all kinds of music.
It’s easy to play any musical instrument: all you have to do is touch the right key at the right time and the instrument will play itself.
I would have to say I might do some stuff, but it’s the film that’s appealing. I was raised on film. My musical experience is all via film, it’s not from classical music.
There was the noise itself, which he thought of vaguely as the noise of classical music, sameish and rhetorical, full of feelings people surely never had
I like – I actually love classical music very much.
My mom loved rock n’ roll. My father hated it. We couldn’t play it when he was around. He liked classical music and Duke Ellington.
Me, who’s educated classically, I went toward rock music ’cause it was sort of a natural evolution from where I was playing with my brother. But I was always drawn back into classical music.
There are so many people who are interested in classical music. Fortunately, I think many of them are quite young, so it’s wonderful to present new programs to them.
There are so many wonderful, wonderful musicians in the world, I cannot possibly make a distinction between the fact that they might play classical music, or bluegrass, or Irish traditional, or Indian music.
