Quotes About Classical

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.

What the world wants, what the world is waiting for, is not Modern Poetry or Classical Poetry or Neo-Classical Poetry - but Good Poetry. And the dreadful disreputable doubt, which stirs in my own skeptical mind, is doubt about whether it would really matter much what style a poet chose to write in, in any period, as long as he wrote Good poetry.

When I was nine years old, I started playing guitar, and I took classical guitar lessons and studied music theory. And played jazz for a while. And then when I was around fourteen years old, I discovered punk rock. And so I then tried to unlearn everything I had learned in classical music and jazz so I could play in punk rock bands.

The instrumental record is a bit subtler. It's the kind of stuff on sound check, when I first pick up my violin and start to play, the kind of melodies that just pour out of me. Some of them sound very classical. Some of them sound experimental, polyrhythmic loops that I make.

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.

Thank God for movie music. It preserves the rich vocabulary in classical music through challenging times.

The foes now are universal - poverty, famine, religious radicalization, desertification, drugs, proliferation of nuclear weapons, ecological devastation. They threaten all nations, just as science and information are the potential friends of all nations. Classical diplomacy and strategy were aimed at identifying enemies and confronting them. Now they have to identify dangers, global or local, and tackle them before they become disasters.

Fire isn't always an element of destruction. Classical alchemical doctrine teaches that it also has dominion over another province: change.

I became a set designer for opera. I'm a great opera buff, I love classical music, and I needed a time-out.

If classical music is the state of the art, then the arts are in a sad state.

My landscapes are not only beautiful, or nostalgic, with a Romantic or classical suggestion of lost Paradises, but above all 'untruthful.' By 'untruthful,' I mean the glorifying way we look at Nature. Nature, which in all its forms is always against us, because it knows no meaning, no pity, no sympathy, because it knows nothing and is absolutely mindless, the total antithesis of ourselves.

Avant-garde, jazz, pop, classical, country and western, rock, free, straight-ahead, etc. are ultimately meaningless terms in the face of the music being discussed at best - at worst, those terms often serve as code words for what is in fact a cultural / political discussion more than a musical one.

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.

I had to listen to the classical music because it calms me down, calms my nerves down.

Unfortunately, the optimistic view that "classical civilization" handed down certain fundamental works that managed to include the knowledge contained in the lost writings has proved groundless. In fact, in the face of a general regression in the level of civilization, it's never the best works that will be saved through an automatic process of natural selection.

Classical and romantic: private language of a family quarrel, a dead dispute over the distribution of emphasis between man and nature.

[Phil Wood] knew about wine. He knew about food. He knew about art. He knew about classical music. He was interested in things.

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.

The classical example of a successful research programme is Newton's gravitational theory: possibly the most successful research programme ever.

In blues, classical and jazz, you get more revered with age.

I love hip-hop; I love Sleigh Bells. I also love classical music and musical theater.

I think blues music is music of the soul. Of course, there are other forms. You could call some classical music blues music in that way.

Our odd idea of the classical world, the white Washington, D.C., is based on buildings that were originally brightly painted.

I heard about Bhagavad Gita very early in my childhood, from the age of five onwards. It was one of the earliest things I started to read when I started to read. And it was very much a part of my consciousness. In the beginning, I saw the "Bhagavad Gita" as a text that was very classical, much like the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" - a mythical saga that showed the eternal conflict between good and evil. But much later, as I grew up, I realized that it was much more than that.

Perhaps if the year was 1447 instead of 1947 I might have hoodwinked my gentle nature by administering her some classical poison from a hollow agate, some tender philter of death. But in our middle-class nosy era it would not have come off the way it used to in the brocaded palaces of the past. Nowadays you have to be a scientist if you want to be a killer.

The peculiar characteristic of classical music is that it is really better than it sounds.

As a rule, my focus is on classical music, but I love jazz. I love everything, actually.

Classical singing - everything had to be homogenous, and it had to just feel like one continuous flow from top to bottom, bottom to top. And in jazz, I felt like, oh, well, I can sing these deep, husky lows if I want and then sing these really, like, tiny, laser highs if I want, as well. And I have - I have no obligation to make it sound like it's just one continuous flow.

Laurence Olivier said if you have ambition to be a serious classical actor, you must be as fit as an athlete. For me, the breakthrough was going to live in California. I exercised. I drank less. It was one of the things about California that had a positive impact on me.

I could have taken the easy life and just done classical, but I felt very strongly about the album, my first pop album, the first time that I'd fused so many influences. I was very proud when it was in the charts in 25 countries at once.

That authentic experience that happens both in the artist and in the audience you can classify as a mystical experience. You can classify it as aesthetic shock, or even a psychedelic experience. Some people seek to recreate that experience through drugs. But the other way that you can do it is through art, and through spectacle. We have those experiences when we go to rock shows, or when we listen to a piece of classical music, or read a particular poem, or see a painting.

A gut-string classical Spanish guitar, a sweet, lovely little lady. The smell of it. Even now, to open a guitar case, when it's an old wooden guitar, I could crawl in and close the lid.

I always listen to all kinds of different music from different years. I listen to the contemporary, but once in a while into eighties, you know just for fun, and sometimes classical too. So I have this big mix on my i-pod... Amy Winehouse, Gwen Stefani, OutKast, Jay-Z. I listen to trance, pop, everything. It really depends on my mood.

All of my knowledge, of both science and religion, I incorporate into the classical tradition of my painting.

Certainly we do not need quantum mechanics for macroscopic objects, which are well described by classical physics - this is the reason why quantum mechanics seems so foreign to our everyday existence.

Suddenly I've got an overwhelming desire to surround myself with the aura of classical and Romantic art.

When I was studying... there weren't any black concert pianists. My choices were intuitive, and I had the technique to do it. People have heard my music and heard the classic in it, so I have become known as a black classical pianist.

My parents met in music school and my father was a music professor and conductor. Growing up, we always had classical and contemporary music playing. There was a lot of Mozart and the Beatles.

Chess is my profession. I am my own boss; I am free. I like literature and music, classical especially. I am in fact quite normal; I have a Bohemian profession without being myself a Bohemian. I am neither a conformist nor a great revolutionary.

I went to college on a classical piano scholarship. My grandmother made me practice one full hour a day. Every day. Man. I thought all she wanted was for me not to have any fun. Next thing you know, you have a career in music. Now, not everybody's going to go on and be Mozart or Michael Jackson. But music makes you smarter.

Jazz isn't like pop, where you sell millions of records with a hit. Your spirit and soul aren't important in pop music. But jazz is like classical music. If people like you, they'll remember you and you'll last forever.

A consistent pursuit of classical physics forces a transformation in the very heart of that physics.

Jazz is America's classical music.

All the children in the world, when they go to school, have the right to study in their mother tongue. But we go to school and run into literary Arabic as children. It sounds like a foreign language. The words for "house" or "table" or "lamp" are not the same as the words we use at home, and most of the other words are alien to children at school. Classical Arabic is one of the prisons of the Arab world.

Bob Dylan's one of the greatest blues singers of the western world; ancient art, on-the-spot improvisation, mind quickness, endless variation, classical formulae, prophetic vision, mighty wind-horse.

Taxi drivers used to ask me what kind of music I did and I'd say, well, it's kind of jazz, soul, classical - but that makes no sense to anyone. Now I say I just write my own songs. I thought I had to help people get me, but I don't think they need to be spoon-fed. If you connect with me that is cool. I don't need the whole world to feel like I am a soul angel.

A classical work doesn't ever have to be understood entirely. But those who are educated and who are still educating themselves must desire to learn more and more from it.

I'm everything I'm made of. So a part of me is made of classical music. I'm grateful for it.