Old Piano Sayings

#1. My father had left behind an old piano. My sister was already going to school, my mother was out working, and I stayed at home alone with my adorable grandmother who understood nothing I said. It was so boring that I stayed at the piano all day long, and that saved my life.

Michel Legrand

#2. The indefatigable pursuit of an unattainable perfection, even though it consists in nothing more than in the pounding of an old piano, is what alone gives a meaning to our life on this unavailing star.

Logan Pearsall Smith

#3. I taught myself off records, Memphis Slim, them old piano players, then added to it. Yeah, hard and loud, beat it to pieces.

Pinetop Perkins

#4. Century-old records are the closest thing we have to a time machine. To listen to the voice of Theodore Roosevelt or the piano playing of Claude Debussy is to feel the years falling away like autumn leaves from a maple tree.

Terry Teachout

#5. You know, my family is very musical, I was surrounded by it. And from four years old I was the one that asked my mother could I take piano lessons.

John Legend

#6. I'm again a twelve-year old dreamer, a girl fascinated by an ancient piano and with Rona Lubliner's fingers.

Victoria Avilan

#7. When I was a kid, three years old, I couldn't walk by the piano without reaching up and trying to play a few notes on it. There are kids who are just drawn to listening to music and dancing to it and trying to conduct.

Michael Tilson Thomas

#8. Right at the end of the war I wrote a piano sonata, which was written at a time when Sam Barber used to come down here and we used to have lunch together in a very nice old hotel that's now not there.

Elliott Carter

#9. It was in Shizuoka, where my home was. I first attended this school when I was five years old. I also attended a regular elementary school, and I was taking piano lessons with a local teacher. I began to study composition at the Yamaha school. And I continued to study there until the age of 15.

Hiromi

#10. I also like the banging piano - that old good-time piano.

Little Richard

#11. Some acts are tricky. Eartha Kitt was tricky in a wonderful, old-style way. She did yoga on the piano and put her hands over her ears when the other acts were on.

Jools Holland

#12. My dears, laugh at me if you like; it is not conventionally beautiful, but there is something in its quaint old face which pleases me. If it could play the piano, I am sure it would really play.

Marcel Proust

#13. All my musical foundations go back to the age of 3. My family tell me that I used to listen to the old crystal set, then go to the piano and pick out the tune that I just heard.

George Shearing

#14. 'Beneath the Piano' by The Devil Makes Three somehow reminds me of an old Johnny Cash song. The song is a lot of fun and tells a story.

Ben Lovett

#15. My dad was the district attorney of New Orleans for about 30 years. And when he opened his campaign headquarters back in the early '70s, when I was 5 years old, my mother wanted me to play the national anthem. And they got an upright piano on the back of a flatbed truck and I played it.

Harry Connick Jr.

#16. I grew up listening to a lot of player-piano music in my house and a lot of old Tin Pan Alley songs and American standards. My dad listened to a lot of traditional Irish music and I grew up doing musical theater. So most of the music I was exposed to as a kid was pre-rock n' roll.

John C. Reilly

#17. I don't come from a musical family at all, but I realized early on I was a musician. I started begging for a piano when I was 6 years old.

Jason Robert Brown

#18. I am surprising myself [at] each show, and the delivered piano often surprises me. Sometimes the piano is so old that I don't have to prepare it, and sometimes I have a concert grand!

Volker Bertelmann

#19. I never saw my grandfather because he had died before I was born, but I have good memories of my grandmother and of how she could play the piano at the old house.

John Forbes Nash Jr.

#20. I was fifteen years old, and I hardly knew how to play a simple Bach prelude on the piano when I began to compose music, and at the most advanced level. I had never studied such things as harmony.

Gyorgy Ligeti

#21. I got started at a really young age. I was about two years old when I started playing the piano and around seven or eight when I started writing my own chords and putting words together.

Jackson Guthy

#22. At home I don't really have any drum machines or anything like that, I just have a piano and a cassette machine, an old-fashioned one, an old relic which I've always used.

Bryan Ferry

#23. And so they played some of the world's loveliest piano music - the exiled homesick girl, the humiliated, tired old man. Not properly. Better than that.

Eva Ibbotson

#24. When I was first starting out, you'd have to bang an old upright piano and stick a mike in it and it would always feed back and you could never turn it up loud enough to be heard and I would beat my hands black and blue and bloody.

Edgar Winter

#25. In France the music schools are a bit old fashioned. I was more excited about doing my own stuff or to play with my friend in my band, than studying the piano.

Yann Tiersen

#26. People don't understand what music really is. I've been a musician since I was 6 years old. I got my first piano, was playing recitals at 8, 10 I picked up a guitar, 12 I picked up my first Pearl Master drum set. I was an artist before I was an 'artist.'

Mitchel Musso

#27. He helped make Living Things even more crazy than I wanted it to be. He added old-fashioned piano and classical folk music - that weird otherworldly vibe - all these elements got onto the record.

Matthew Sweet

#28. I started going to a piano teacher at 5 years old, but pretty soon I started picking things out on my own and stopped taking music lessons. I never could read music very well, but I've still been doing it.

Mose Allison

#29. I did a concert at five years old in the garden of one of the church members, and we raised some money to buy a new piano in our little church.

Al Jarreau

#30. I met this wonderful guy who owned an old pub near the Eiffel Tower called Malone's (he's French but it's an Irish name). He had a cellar with a piano and told me I could use it whenever I wanted to. I played lots of gigs down there. When I came back I played a show at the Knitting Factory.

Regina Spektor

#31. American Ballet Theatre's rehearsal studios are at 890 Broadway, an old building where exposed pipes clank and hiss in uneven accompaniment to piano music. The high ceilings wear a toupee of dust. The wall paint peels like a newbie ballerina's toes.

Sascha Radetsky

#32. By the time I was six or seven-years-old, I had learned several techniques of how to use my voice and was able to choose the sound I wanted to distinguish myself, so I started writing songs on the piano.

Wendy Starland

#33. I consider the piano my 'main' instrument and have been playing for as long as I can remember. It seems to me that I might have come up with something resembling a song as early as 4 or 5 years old.

Ian MacKaye

#34. I was 20 years old. I had moved to Los Angeles from Columbus, Ohio. I was working as a piano salesman - a terrible piano salesman. I couldn't sell them. I could demonstrate them, but people wouldn't buy them from me.

Michael Feinstein

#35. Well, since I'm six years old, I've been playing the violin, the piano, I've been singing. It's always been a dream of mine, but I really never had the courage to actually go and do it professionally.

Paris Hilton

#36. My first instrument was the piano; I played in the church, and before that I sang in church. I didn't learn the guitar until I was 24 years old.

Chuck Brown

#37. I heard a young black pianist. He was a teenager, I was eight years old, and he was playing boogie-woogie, and he just knocked me out. He thought he was alone in the old barn on the beat-up upright piano, but I was hiding in the corner so he wouldn't see me.

Mike Stoller

#38. I decided I wanted to be a musician when I saw the movie 'Amadeus' around 1987. I was five years old, so it was a good time to start piano lessons after seeing Tom Hulce who played Mozart play the harpsichord on his back with his hands crossed. Such a great movie to inspire a five-year-old.

Mark Salling

#39. When I'm not touring, I sing at home, either at the piano or I'll pick up my guitar, singing old Buck Owens songs.

Burton Cummings

#40. But do you know how old I will be by the time I learn to really play the piano / act / paint / write a decent play?
Yes ... the same age you will be if you don't.

Julia Cameron

#41. In my bachelor days, I had a small upright piano in my kitchen. It cost £10 from eBay plus £70 delivery. It was because I'd seen an old photo of Tom Waits - with dirty dishes, empty bottles, a hot plate, a coffee machine and a piano strewn with lyric sheets - and fallen in love with it.

Jamie Cullum

#42. I would play music every day from the time I was about 4 or 5 years old. Every time I would go from one end of the house to the other, I would pass the piano and play a few notes.

William Eggleston

#43. I got started when I was 3 years old because my father was a music teacher and my lessons were free. Instead of learning to walk, you learn to play the piano.

Carla Bley