Top 100 Quotes About Bach's Music
#1. Once I understood Bach's music, I wanted to be a concert pianist. Bach made me dedicate my life to music, and it was that teacher who introduced me to his world.
Nina Simone
#2. Bach's music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe cannot be regarded a complete failure.
Emil Cioran
#3. 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
#4. 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.
#5. Although I don't believe in God, Bach's music shows me what a love of God must feel like.
Alain De Botton
#6. Bach's music is really some of the greatest. I think, in some ways, Bach is the most profound composer of all.
Joshua Bell
#7. Jesus never heard of Beethoven and Bach. Why aren't we playing more country music in church ?
Tex Sample
#8. 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
#9. All music should have no other end and aim than the glory of God and the soul's refreshment; where this is not remembered there is no real music but only a devilish hubbub.
Johann Sebastian Bach
#10. I remain loyal to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert in music and to Shakespeare and Jane Austen in literature.
Anne Stevenson
#11. 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.
Johann Sebastian Bach
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. I listen to Bach a great deal. In general I like to listen to hymns and liturgical music.
Marilynne Robinson
#19. The final aim and reason of all music is nothing other than the glorification of God and the refreshment of the spirit.
Johann Sebastian Bach
#20. Music is an agreeable harmony for the honor of God and the permissible delights of the soul.
Johann Sebastian Bach
#21. 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
#22. 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
#24. When people ask me how is it I was a musician, I facetiously say that I'm a firm believer in reincarnation and in a previous life I was Johann Sebastian Bach's guide dog.
George Shearing
#25. My thesis statement would be - Bach didn't write Baroque music. He wrote great music.
Chris Thile
#26. I grew up on Bach and Beethoven, and now I'm listening to more modern composers who I can't even name. But since I'm constantly doing music, it's difficult to have that quality time to listen to music and do classical stuff.
A.R. Rahman
#27. The music of Bach is without doubt the most sacred gift to the world of art.
Heitor Villa-Lobos
#28. My music wasn't written by Mozart, Beethoven, Bach or Schubert. It's written by God and me. They go "a one and a two and up." We start on the downbeat. Bam! And that's where we got them.
James Brown
#29. I find that I never lose Bach. I don't know why I have always loved him so. Except that he is so pure, so relentless and incorruptible, like a principle of geometry.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
#30. Music's only purpose should be for the glory of God and the recreation
of the human spirit.
Johann Sebastian Bach
#31. Others, tiring of the sound of Buxtehude and Bach for hours on end, would complain there was no tune. That was exactly the thing he liked best about a fugue, the fact that it could not be sung. A fugue was not singular, as a melody was, but plural. It was a conversation.
Kate Grenville
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. In Bach, the vital cells of music are united as the world is in God.
Gustav Mahler
#38. I have to tell you that J.S. Bach was easily the greatest musical innovator in the history of the world. He was so advanced for his time. There's a spiritual depth to his music. You can listen to it and it's like meditation.
Brian Wilson
#39. Where there is devotional music, God is always at hand with His gracious presence.
Johann Sebastian Bach
#40. I can take any series of numbers and turn it into music, from Bach to bebop, Herbie Hancock to hip-hop.
Donald Byrd
#41. Same with anyone who's been flying for years and loves it still ... we're part of a world we deeply love. Just as musicians feel about scores and melodies, dancers about the steps and flow of music, so we're one with the principle of flight, the magic of being aloft in the wind!
Richard Bach
#42. Probably the most reliable comfort music for me over the years has been Bach.
Rivers Cuomo
#44. I'd like to get something together - like a Handel, Bach, Muddy waters, flamenco type of thing. If I could get that sound, I'd be happy
Jimi Hendrix
#45. Bach is an astronomer, discovering the most marvellous stars. Beethoven challenges the universe. I only try to express the soul and the heart of man.
Frederic Chopin
#46. The aim and final end of all music should be none other than the glory of God and the refreshment of the soul.
Johann Sebastian Bach
#47. Did anyone tell Toscanini, or Bach, that he had to choose between music and family, between art and a normal life?
Elisabeth Mann Borgese
#48. Any species capable of producing, at this earliest, juvenile stage of its development ... the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, cannot be all bad.
Lewis Thomas
#49. Music owes as much to Bach as religion to its founder.
Robert Schumann
#50. Like all music, the figured bass should have no other end and aim than the glory of God and the recreation of the soul; where this is not kept in mind there is no true music, but only an infernal clamour and ranting.
Johann Sebastian Bach
#51. 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
#52. You just have to press the right keys and the right pedals at the right time and the music plays itself.
Johann Sebastian Bach
#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. I had no idea of the historical evolution of the civilized world's music and had not realized that all modern music owes everything to Bach.
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov
#55. I have some good books of Bach keyboard music transcribed for guitar, and there's always a nylon-string guitar hanging on the wall in my house and a bunch of classical guitar books to grab. I kind of do that just for fun.
Rivers Cuomo
#56. I love classical. I have a lot of, like, Bach and Mozart and stuff. Then you flip on over, and I've got, like, Kanye West and, you know, just a bunch of - I am very eclectic. I love every sort of music.
Kaley Cuoco
#57. When we play an unaccompanied Bach suite we may compare ourselves to an actor in Shakespeare's day, creating scenery which did not exist at all, through the power of declamation and suggestion. So in Bach. There is but one voice
and many voices have to be suggested.
Pablo Casals
#58. You have got to make new music, that is the way that I look at it anyway.
Sebastian Bach
#59. I write my lyrics into the computer and I hum my music into the dictaphone.
Sebastian Bach
#60. Bach has taken us on a journey that we interpret and experience through our own memories, feelings and conditioning. You will respond differently from the way I do, and vice versa. That is the glory of music, especially music as immortal as this.
James Rhodes
#61. Composers most identified with the chamber music form are Corelli, Vivaldi, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and, of course, Bach. Of course, Bach. If there is any one composer who gives us reason and emotion, it is Bach.
Karen DeCrow
#62. Of course I have used dissonance in my time, but there has been too much dissonance. Bach used dissonance as good salt for his music. Others applied pepper, seasoned the dishes more and more highly, till all healthy appetites were sick and until the music was nothing but pepper.
Sergei Prokofiev
#63. If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.
Emil Cioran
#64. Has it struck you that the music which is regarded as the most sublime in western civilization, which is the music of Bach, is called baroque?
Pierre Schaeffer
#65. There is no kind of music I don't listen to. Everything good is interesting. I am as happy with a Bach fugue as I am with a record by Thelonious Monk.
Maira Kalman
#66. All Bach's last movements are like the running of a sewing machine.
(on Bach)
Arnold Bax
#67. What I have achieved by industry and practice, anyone else with tolerable natural gift and ability can also achieve.
Johann Sebastian Bach
#68. Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.
Lewis Thomas
#69. I do not think that music keeps evolving. It evolved through Bach; since then, in my humble opinion, all the innovations added nothing.
Gordon Getty
#70. If all the music written since Bach's time should be lost, it could be reconstructed on the foundation which Bach laid.
Charles Gounod
#71. I love dancing to the radio every morning, to start the day with such passion. Otherwise, life is too sad. My little daughter and I like dancing to classical music: Bach and Schubert.
Anna Mouglalis
#72. When a friend introduced me to a Bach chaconne, he started by describing it by saying that it has 256 measures (256=2^8) divided into 4 sections of 64 measures (64=2^6), and I liked it even before I heard a single note.
James Stein
#73. Kenji Mizoguchi is to the cinema what Bach is to music, Cervantes is to literature, Shakespeare is to theatre, Titian is to painting: the very greatest.
Jean Douchet
#75. I like classical music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and I adore Bach above all.
Gregory Maguire
#76. Music always stimulates my imagination. When I'm writing I usually have some Baroque music on low in the background chamber music by Bach, Telemann, and the like.
Haruki Murakami
#77. Absurdly, irrationally, she believed that music could make a difference to the temper of the world.She did not investigate this belief, test it to see whether it made sense;she simply believed it, and so she chose music that expressed order and healing:Bach for order, Mozart for healing.
Alexander McCall Smith
#78. There is something comforting about going into a practice room, putting your sheet music on a stand and playing Bach over and over again.
Andrew Bird
#79. ... frankly I'm not going to listen to someone hold forth on the Greatest Music of All Time if they start with the beatles. If they start with Mozart I'll have a little patience; because I know that Bach is better.
Nathan "N.R." Gaddis
#80. But music is very important. Music is a tonic for the pineal gland. Music isn't Bach or Beethoven; music is the can opener of the soul. It makes you terribly quiet inside, makes you aware that there's a roof to your being.
Henry Miller
#82. I've outdone anyone you can name - Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500.
James Brown
#83. A great piece of music is beautiful regardless of how it is performed. Any prelude or fugue of Bach can be played at any tempo, with or without rhythmic nuances, and it will still be great music. That's how music should be written, so that no-one, no matter how philistine, can ruin it.
Dmitri Shostakovich
#84. Whenever you study composition you inevitably encounter Bach right off the bat. You can't get across the room without running into him and the other greats. Analyzing Bach absolutely influenced my jazz playing.
Howard Roberts
#85. Bach is the beginning and end of all music.
Max Reger
#87. I can find something between sight and hearing and I can produce a fugue in colors as Bach has done in music.
Frantisek Kupka
#88. But it wasn't just a technical approach towards the piano, studying the music for this film was also a way of approaching the soul of the film, because the film is really about the soul of Schubert and the soul of Bach.
Isabelle Huppert
#89. I think in Baroque music, especially in the case of Bach, what really transformed Bach's musical language, what changed it for him was hearing Vivaldi, hearing the sort of manipulation of small cells of information and patterns in order to generate sort of huge blocks of harmony.
Mahan Esfahani
#90. If you have a piece by Bach, he often develops the piece to such a high level that you can hardly do much more to it. But Saint-Luc wrote very simple baroque music, and so if you do not embellish it, it just falls apart. It's way too simple.
David Russell
#91. The best picture has not yet been painted; the greatest poem is still unsung; the mightiest novel remains to be written; the divinest music has not been conceived, even by Bach. In science, probably ninety-nine percent of the knowable has not yet been discovered.
Lincoln Steffens
#92. When you hear Bach or Mozart, you hear perfection. Remember that Bach, Mozart and Beethoven were great improvisers. I can hear that in their music.
Dave Brubeck
#93. Take Bach or Schubert: Their music was dedicated to God but filled and shaped their worldly lives. If you are a committed atheist, you lean back and miss all the richness of that history.
Martin Walser
#94. Beethoven tells you what it's like to be Beethoven and Mozart tells you what it's like to be human. Bach tells you what it's like to be the universe.
Douglas Adams
#95. To wake up one day and be Steinway and Glen in One... Glen Steinway, Steinway Glen, all for Bach.
Thomas Bernhard
#96. I listen to lots of music, especially Bach, opera (all periods), German lieder, chamber music, and rock, old and new. I can't listen to music while I write. It's too absorbing.
Cheryl Mendelson
#97. Bach takes you to a very quiet place within yourself, to the inner core, a place where you are calm and at peace.
Yo-Yo Ma
#98. I have always kept one end in view, namely ... to conduct a well-regulated church music to the honour of God.
Johann Sebastian Bach
#99. I'm not making any absurd comparisons between myself and Bach, but I aspire to that, that my music will have the legs to survive whatever context it finds itself in.
Steve Reich
#100. It's easier to interest a conservative audience in pushing the musical boundaries than to involve a young audience used to very noisy, assertive music in something like Schubert or Bach because the further back you go, the less bells and whistles there are.
Michael Tilson Thomas
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