Quotes About Classical

In fact although I have studied in a Conservatory the classical piano, I do not consider myself a classical pianist.

There is no essential difference between classical and popular music. Music is music. I want to communicate with the listener who finds Indian classical music remote.

It seemed to me that had Haydn lived to our day he would have retained his own style while accepting something of the new at the same time. That was the kind of symphony I wanted to write: a symphony in the classical style. And when I saw that my idea was beginning to work, I called it the Classical Symphony.

Why is it that beautiful women never seem to have curiosity? Is it because they know they're classical? With classical things the Lord finished the job. Ordinary ugly people know they're deficient and they go on looking for the pieces.

... Andres Segovia literally created the genre of classical guitar, which hadn't existed before around 1910. There was flamenco, which he borrowed from, but he actually arranged the works of Mozart and other classical composers for guitar, something that had never been done before ... Segovias' style is not slick or contrived, but it's still very clean and his timing is impeccable ... it's got a feeling of casual elegance, as if he's sitting around the house in Spain with a jug of wine, just playing from the heart.

When I was growing up, until I was 18 or 19, I was totally invested in the classical music world. I had no concept of anything else. The closest thing to a cool band I listened to was Radiohead. Radiohead were the only band I liked in high school. I was just obsessed with classical music, opera, Claude Debussy, and that kind of stuff.

But those musics do not address the larger kind of architecture in time that classical music does, whatever each one of us knows that classical music must mean.

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.

A lot of my colleagues just don't really realize that they have to work in order to get the interest of an audience, especially with young kids, especially because it [classical music] is not that popular. You don't see it on TV, you don't hear it on radio, so you really gotta put an effort into promoting classical music.

When I'm in the classical world, I really treat it as exactly classical and I don't try and spruce it up or jazz it up or make it easier for the masses.

I studied classical percussion for ten years. At one point I was thinking about going to the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, but then I realized it's actually not what I wanted to do.

Listening to classical music is a journey not a state; it's an activity not a meditation.

Jazz is an endless source of ideas, because you can use anything. You can play operatic arias. You can incorporate them into jazz. You can play gypsy music and incorporate it into jazz. You can European classical and you can incorporate it into jazz. You can use anything and jazz it up, as they used to say.

Classical music is one of the best things that ever happened to mankind. If you get introduced to it in the right way, it becomes your friend for life.

I listen to Neil Young and jazz and classical stations and, if my girlfriend's driving, it tends to be Hall & Oates.

When I was 20, Shostakovich was my favorite composer. I still find his Fifth Symphony wonderful, with its outstanding themes and rhythms. That's the piece that made me want to be a classical composer.

Today is such a time, when the project of interpretation is largely reactionary, stifling. Like the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere, the effusion of interpretations of art today poisons our sensibilities. In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

In this same tradition, beauty is inextricably bound up with the principles of order and harmony believed to underlie the cosmos. Artists in the Classical tradition, inspired by Platonic idealism, strove to create images that represented not the world of particulars-with all its defects-but an ideal image conceived in the mind, which was taken as representing some absolute, pure, ideal form of which all particular, material forms are but a mere shadow.

I think that's one of the things that has always put me in kind of an odd niche. It's that all of my understanding of orchestral music is via film, not via classical music like it's supposed to be. To me it's the same, it doesn't make any difference.

English is a forgiving language. It's not like Classical Arabic and it's not like French. You can speak broken English and be expressive and no one will hold it against you.

It was a grey day, that least fleshly of all weathers; a day of dreams and far hopes and clear visions. It was a day easily associated with those abstract truths and purities that dissolve in the sunshine or fade out in mocking laughter by the light of the moon. The trees and clouds were carved in classical severity; the sounds of the countryside had harmonized to a monotone, metallic as a trumpet, breathless as the Grecian urn.

When I came to the States, I still wanted to be an electric guitar player. But moved to Santa Fe in '86. And just decided that nylon string guitar is really what I wanted to do... And that really change my life totally as well... And Santa Fe is one of those really unusual places that is such an interesting mix of culture. There is a lot of from restaurants to music... I remember one of the first groups I saw playing there in the back of a restaurant, was a banjo player, a classical violinist, and a flamenco guitarist. And I thought to myself, "What? You know, this is great."

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.

How can one talk in a classical language about a child who's torn apart in an explosion in the market near his school? People in Iraq don't talk about their joys, their problems, and the destruction of the country in literary diction.

But I'd play on everything from pop records to a lot of the glam stuff to rock stuff to classical stuff. I used to get called to do all those things, it was great.

I'm not interested in popular culture. I hate Quentin Tarantino. I rarely go to movies. I hate rock 'n' roll. I work. I think. I listen to classical music. I brood. I like sports cars.

A bride should look at everything she possibly can...just so she can experiment and see what makes her really feel beautiful or glamorous or classical or whatever she desires to be on that particular day.

I play piano and guitar. Acoustic guitar. I tried studying classical guitar when I was 16 but it got really hard. I could never play a lead to save my life.

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.

Another classical music teacher from Performing Arts that I've stayed in contact with is Jonathan Strasser.

I read and write classical piano and percussion, also guitar.

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

Many fail to realize this great recording industry was built by so-called jazz artists. And at the other end of the spectrum, a base in European classical music as well.

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.

I did extensive, extensive recordings and made a classical CD-ROM set, which is still on the market. For ten years, it was by itself as the cream of the crop of samples.

It was my 16th birthday - my mom and dad gave me my Goya classical guitar that day. I sat down, wrote this song, and I just knew that that was the only thing I could ever really do - write songs and sing them to people.

Throughout the early Christian period, every great calamity - famine, earthquake, and plague - led to mass conversions, another indirect influence by which epidemic diseases contributed to the destruction of classical civilization. Christianity owes a formidable debt to bubonic plague and to smallpox, no less than to earthquake and volcanic eruptions.

You always have to be diplomatic with music, with classical, with whatever you do.

Indian classical dance is sustained by a profound philosophy. Form seeks to merge with the formless, motions seek to become a part of the motionless, and the dancing individual seeks to become one with the eternal dance of the cosmos.

I started off with classical music, and I got into jazz when I was about 14 years old. And I've been playing jazz ever since.

In case you haven't noticed, they're moving a lot faster. I don't know about the laws of physics on your planet, but where I come from an object moving at subclass speed can't catch up to one running at starclass. But if you know something about turbines, thrusters and engines, quantum or classical physics that I've somehow missed, then please enlighten me. - Caillen Dagan to Desideria Denarii

We can compare classical chess and rapid chess with theatre and cinema - some actors don't like the latter and prefer to work in the theatre.

I went through eight years of classical piano lessons without being able to read notes. I only have to hear a melody to be able to play it. It used to freak my piano teacher out when he finally noticed that notes don't make any sense to me and that I played by ear.

Several classical sayings that one likes to repeat had quite a different meaning from the ones later times attributed to them.

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.

My core competency has really informed my painting. The roots of editing stem from classical paintings - classic painters intended to drive your eye from this conflict to that intrigue, ending with a caprice. That is a montage, that is editing. It became a flipbook in later generations.

The principal thing is the question of how our culture views age: that old is ugly Just think of Rodin, how he dealt with people of all ages. I have the feeling that I'm alive, I have a body I can make it extremely interesting. That keeps me alive and vital. It's a kind of process of energizing myself by my belief that the classical tradition of art that we've inherited from the Greeks is a load of bullshit.

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.