Quotes About Bach

#1. Bach's music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded a complete failure.

Emil Cioran

#2. How could anybody think of Bach as 'cold' when these [cello] suites seem to shine with the most glittering kind of poetry," Casals said. "As I got on with the study I discovered a new world of space and beauty ... the feelings I experienced were among the purest and most intense in my artistic life!

Pablo Casals

#3. One does not play Bach without having done scales. But neither does one play a scale merely for the sake of the scale.

Simone Weil

#4. I began to realize that some of the things Ornette Coleman had said about things being played three or fours ways, independently of each other, were true because Bach had also composed that way.

Miles Davis

#5. On Saturday afternoons when all the things are done in the house and there's no real work to be done, I play Bach and Chopin and turn it up real loudly and get a good bottle of chardonnay and sit out on my deck and look out at the garden.

Maya Angelou

#6. Perhaps Bach and Beethoven are strange bedfellows for Mickey Mouse, but it's all been a lot of fun.

Walt Disney Company

#7. It may well be that some composers do not believe in God. All of them, however, believe in Bach.

Bela Bartok

#8. Playing Shakespeare requires technique. You don't play a Bach toccata by getting in the mood.

Kevin Kline

#9. Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach's St Matthew Passion on a ukulele: The instrument is too crude for the work, for the audience and for the performer.

Ben Bagdikian

#10. When Bach died some of his children sold his scores to the butcher they had decided the paper was more useful for wrapping meat. In a small village in Germany a father brought home a limp goose wrapped in paper that was covered with strange and beautiful symbols.

Simon Van Booy

#11. For me, Bach is like Shakespeare. He has known all and felt all. He is everything.

Pablo Casals

#12. When you play Bach like Chopin, and Chopin like Bach, something good happens.

Pablo Casals

#13. Sophie Bach from The Maker:
You're a human being with a personality and a will, and you make choices and think and create. Is there no meaning to you, Adrien Bach?
And what about us? Is the way we feel about each other just simulated emotions from some biological process - nothing more?

Wes Moore

#14. Simplicity is always a virtue. One kid on a riverbank working out a Stephen Foster tune on his new harmonica heard from the correct esthetic distance projects more magic and power than the entire Vienna Philharmonic and Chorus laboring (once again) through the Mozart Requiem or Bach's B Minor Mass.

Edward Abbey

#15. Jesus never heard of Beethoven and Bach. Why aren't we playing more country music in church ?

Tex Sample

#16. We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.

George Steiner

#17. You're the kind of child who might develop a passion for Bach.
I told him I hadn't at school. The one Bach piece I learnt made me feel I was being repeatedly hit on the head with a teaspoon.

Dodie Smith

#18. If Beethoven is a prodigy of man, Bach is a miracle of God.

Gioachino Rossini

#19. Yes, I mean like you know, having studied with Yehudi Menuhin that is like some direct route into Bach, because he was one of the foremost interpreters of Bach for the violin.

Nigel Kennedy

#20. Nothing is so musical as the sound of pouring bourbon for the first drink on a Sunday morning. Not Bach or Schubert or any of those masters.

Carson McCullers

#21. What can you say about a twenty-five year old girl who died? That she was beautiful and brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. The Beatles. And me.

Erich Segal

#22. In Bach, Beethoven and Wagner we admire principally the depth and energy of the human mind; in Mozart, the divine instinct.

Edvard Grieg

#23. That's why it's called Sebastian Bach. I mean, it's a permanent band, pretty much, but if I jam with other people, it just makes a better album, I think.

Sebastian Bach

#24. A
Round of fiddles playing Bach.

Louis Zukofsky

#25. A lot of Viners do more relatable stuff, but I try to stay away from that. I try to maybe take a relatable situation and Bach it up.

King Bach

#26. I cannot listen to Beethoven or Mahler or Chopin or Bach when I write because those composers require you stop what you are doing and listen.

Antonio Damasio

#27. I remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature.

Anne Stevenson

#28. Spencer was searching for a woman interested in gold, inorganic chemistry, outdoor sex and the music of Bach. In short, he was looking for himself, only female.

Woody Allen

#29. A collection of Bach organ fugues (nerds have a thing about Bach),

Neal Stephenson

#30. I saw the dance as a vision of ineffable power. A man could, with dignity and a towering majesty, dance. Not mince, cavort, do "fancy dancing" or "showoff" steps. No: Dance as Michelangelo's visions dance and as the music of Bach dances.

Jose Limon

#31. Beethoven for listening; Liszt, Chopin, and Beethoven for playing as well as Bach and Prokofiev and so on. If I kept going, this list would spiral. It's as wide as literature; in fact, it is probably wider.

William Golding

#32. I've spent a lot of time playing Bach partitas. One of my first jobs was to play for ballet and modern classes, so the music in 'Partita' is kind of like choreography for me.

Caroline Shaw

#33. It would be great to have Bach in one corner, Bessie Smith in another, John Lennon in another. That's what I'd ideally like. A studio of the dead.

Jools Holland

#34. Jazz isn't as profitable for labels like Hip hop or Rap. Jazz needs subsidies to continue, just like European classical works of Bach and Beethoven are subsidized.

Jimmy Heath

#35. It was kind of sort of the heavens opened up and I realized that Bach, at least, you know - out of all the classical music - needs to be a big part of my life.

Chris Thile

#36. She wore an A-line bridal gown with a V-shaped neckline while Apollo playing Bach's Air on the G string.

Tai

#37. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Tchaikovsky were not classical musicians while they were alive and active, they were the rock stars of their day.

Seymour Stein

#38. Up to the age of 14 I had not heard a note of anything before 1750, never heard a note of Bach, never heard anything after Wagner, and never heard any real jazz.

Steve Reich

#39. There's power to: and everyone should have that, but everyone doesn't. Power to play Bach, or tennis, or boccie if you like. And there's power over; and no one should have that, but people do.

Marilyn French

#40. I listen only to Bach, Beethoven or Mozart. Life is too short to waste on other composers.

John Edensor Littlewood

#41. It [Bach's cello suites] is like a great diamond," said [Mischa] Maisky in a thick Russian accent, "with so many different cuts that reflect light in so many different ways.

Eric Siblin

#42. I listen to Bach a great deal. In general I like to listen to hymns and liturgical music.

Marilynne Robinson

#43. Bach is really the ultimate in bass players you know

Jack Bruce

#44. I found it amazing people can think that art must be connected to religion. Religion may give art themes, but there would still be art without religion. Bach is not proof that art exists.

Michel Onfray

#45. Soli Deo gloria.
Latin for Glory to God alone.
Bach used the initials (SDG) at the end of
all his musical manuscripts.

Bach

#46. I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach into outer space on the Voyager spacecraft. But that would be boasting.

Lewis Thomas

#47. I like a very dark house, just black. I sit there and just think. Once I'm still and quiet inside, I'll begin. It's very personal; it has to be. One song may be Bach, the next blues, a song from TV, or a nursery rhyme or jazz piece.

Bobby McFerrin

#48. If you play Bach every day, you are not so alone.

Pablo Casals

#49. When I was five, I am told, and asked what my favorite things in the world were, I answered, 'smoked salmon and Bach.' (Now, sixty years later, my answer would be the same).

Oliver Sacks

#50. Some months ago, while I was preparing a new work, I told a young cinema executive my intention of including in a soundtrack two themes from Bach. But when he asked me which has been the last hit from that Bach?, then I knew that I had no longer place in cinema.

Maurice Jarre

#51. Bach is played altogether too fast. Music that presupposes a visual comprehension of lines of sound advancing side by side becomes chaos for the listener; high speed makes comprehension impossible. Yet

Albert Schweitzer

#52. Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that's easy. What's hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.

Charles Mingus

#53. I think that if I were required to spend the rest of my life on a desert island, and to listen to or play the music of any one composer during all that time, that composer would almost certainly be Bach.

Glenn Gould

#54. In the 1950s in the United States, few music lovers were listening to chamber music. Daddy played Bach and Haydn on our phonograph for me. Not only did I become familiar with the form; he discussed the concerti. My own head start. My own Head Start.

Karen DeCrow

#55. My own musical background is based in the blues, and in classical composition. I grew up listening to Muddy Waters, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Beethoven and Bach.

Frederick Lenz

#56. If you try to have a fashion show with Bach fugues and John Coltrane, it doesn't really work.

Isaac Mizrahi

#57. Colour does not make so much difference. Look at the Bach Chaconne: There is not one dynamic mark in the whole Bach Chaconne. Colours do not make so much difference.

Ruggiero Ricci

#58. You like sequences," Fuka-Eri asked, without a question mark. "To me, they're like Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. I never get tired of them.

Haruki Murakami

#59. he knew from studying maps in preparation: the broad avenues leading to the Brandenburg Gate. He had played Bach's Brandenburg Concertos records many times, intricate magic alive in the air. The gate that led to the town of Brandenburg an der Havel.

Gregory Benford

#60. That's the beauty of music. You can take a theme from a Bach sacred chorale and improvise. It doesn't make any difference where the theme comes from; the treatment of it can be jazz.

Dave Brubeck

#61. If Beethoven and Bach hooked up with Mozart and made a band, they could be a distant runner up to The D.

Jack Black

#62. I liked Bach played the way people expect Chopin to be played, and vice versa.

Eleanor Bron

#63. And for heaven's sake don't play Bach," ordered Randy. "It's so jumpy for today." Rush

Elizabeth Enright

#64. Although I don't believe in God, Bach's music shows me what a love of God must feel like.

Alain De Botton

#65. There are so many different people that I've emulated vocally. In the rock world - Sebastian Bach, Vince Neil, Freddie Mercury, Robert Plant. They all had amazing vocal talent.

Fergie

#66. No one believes in God any more, but everyone believes in Bach

Mauricio Kagel

#67. Thinking should be like musical meditation. Has any philosopher pursued a thought to its limits the way Bach or Beethoven develop and exhaust a musical theme? Even after having read the most profound thinkers, one still feels the need to begin anew. Only music gives definitive answers.

Emile M. Cioran

#68. I would rather play Chiquita Banana and have my swimming pool than play Bach and starve.

Xavier Cugat

#69. I played a lot of Bach's partitas and sonatas; I like the way that Bach was abstracting already from these dance forms.

Caroline Shaw

#70. I love Bach, I love Beethoven, I love Mozart, I love the Beatles, I love you know, Stockhausen, I love many things. But for some reason I come back to Elizabethan music because it's a little bit like the Beatles.

Tod Machover

#71. Bach and Beethoven, all of them, they had to write something to please the upper structure, those with money and power.

Sun Ra

#72. All five hundred boys want to go out with the same ten anorexic girls." She said, "I'm a good musician, but not many guys are looking for a girl that plays great Bach preludes.

Mary Pipher

#73. I see it as my job to try to keep Bach in the mainstream and present his music with, rather than without, its emotional core.

Nigel Kennedy

#74. What gives Bach and Mozart a place apart is that these two great expressive composers never sacrificed form to expression.

Camille Saint-Saens

#75. I don't think I had a Catherine Bach poster, but I know a lot of my friends desecrated those, big time.

Sean William Scott

#76. Whether you love Bach or would rather listen to a composition produced by Kulitta Software, Bach has and will continue to demand the we approach and answer the question, 'what is the art, science and language of music?

Anastasia Lily

#77. In Bach there is still too much crude Christianity, crude Germanism, crude scholasticism; he stands on the threshold of European (modern) music, but he looks back from there to the Middle Ages.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#78. Whether the angels play only Bach praising God, I am not quite sure. I am sure, however, that en famille they play Mozart.

Karl Barth

#79. Maybe it's egocentric or whatever, but when I'm playing Beethoven, Bach, Hendrix, or whoever it is, in the end, it just feels like my own music and I'm making it up as I'm going along.

Nigel Kennedy

#80. You can't have Bach, Mozart and Beethoven as your favorite composers. They simply define what music is!

Michael Tilson Thomas

#81. I never listen to music when I am writing. It would be impossible. I listen to Bach in the mornings, mostly choral music; also some Handel, mostly songs and arias; I like Schubert's and Beethoven's chamber music and Sibelius' symphonies; for opera, I listen to Mozart and in recent years Wagner.

Colm Toibin

#82. In my younger days, I used to visit record shops and covet boxed sets of Beethoven symphonies, Wagner operas, Bach cantatas, Mozart piano concertos. Only rarely was I able to find the money for such luxuries.

Michael Dirda

#83. Bach is the supreme genius of music ... This man, who knows everything and feels everything, cannot write one note, however unimportant it may appear, which is anything but transcendent. He has reached the heart of every noble thought, and has done it

Pablo Casals

#84. 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

#85. To generate a handful of masterworks, Mozart composed more than 600 pieces before his death at thirty-five, Beethoven produced 650 in his lifetime, and Bach wrote over a thousand.

Adam M. Grant

#86. I'd love to have William Faulkner, Beethoven and Bach over. I want to find out what makes those guys tick!

Candy Crowley

#87. I want Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D played at my funeral. If it isn't I shall jolly well want to know why.

Sybil Thorndike

#88. Bach is a colossus of Rhodes, beneath whom all musicians pass and will continue to pass. Mozart is the most beautiful, Rossini the most brilliant, but Bach is the most comprehensive: he has said all there is to say.

Charles Gounod

#89. Oh, you happy sons of the North who have been reared at the bosom of Bach, how I envy you!

Giuseppe Verdi

#90. If one were asked to name one musician who came closest to composing without human flaw, I suppose general consensus would choose Johann Sebastian Bach ...

Aaron Copland

#91. Beethoven was ahead of the times, Bach behind them.

Ralph Vaughan Williams

#92. The vitality of art is its capacity for infinite expansion. One form doesn't preclude another any more than the existence of Mozart makes the existence of Bach superfluous.

Lloyd Alexander

#93. B. B. King is no match for Johann Sebastian Bach.

Ilana Mercer

#94. I think J.S. Bach's music stands among humankind's greatest accomplishments. For me, Bach's music is not only as good as music gets, but also as good as it gets, period
as good as existence, reality, life and the world.

Andrew W.K.

#95. If Bach is not in Heaven, I am not going!

William F. Buckley Jr.

#96. Each time we explore Bach's music we feel as if we have traveled great distances to, and through, a remote but entrancing soundscape

John Eliot Gardiner

#97. Did anyone tell Toscanini, or Bach, that he had to choose between music and family, between art and a normal life?

Elisabeth Mann Borgese

#98. I put together the influences of my life in as clear a way as I possibly can, in the same way that Beethoven or Schoenberg or Bach put their influences together.

John Zorn

#99. Music owes as much to Bach as religion to its founder.

Robert Schumann

#100. Goldberg Variations. The simplicity of the opening aria calmed her nerves. Bach

John Tesarsch