Top 100 Quotes About Classical Music
#1. I don't mind being classified as a jazz artist, but I do mind being restricted to being a jazz artist. My foundation has been in jazz, though I didn't really start out that way. I started in classical music, but my formative years were in jazz, and it makes a great foundation.
Herbie Hancock
#2. Since I've grown up I really wanted to be able to create something different. In Persian music, opposite, again, to classical music, that the instrument developed and evolved over, like, hundreds of years, our instrument all remained the same.
Hafez Nazeri
#3. The Zombies were really unique - they had elements of jazz and classical music in their songs and songwriting. They had a very, very different sound compared to a lot of their contemporaries at the time.
Paul Weller
#4. It's wonderful doing concerts in places like New York and London, but I feel a responsibility to also bring my work home, to bring world-class, classical music to Somerset.
Charles Hazlewood
#5. What music I listen to day to day changes very, very much. I can go from bluegrass to heavy metal, to blues, to classical and big band and then go to pop and rap.
Casey James
#6. I love classical music and often listen to symphonies or opera in the morning.
William Mapother
#7. My father did not bother that I play not a classical music. He always congratulated me for my development in music, I mean in any music but, he hang on to continue training at the Academy of Music ... however, I never mentioned to my teachers that I trained myself at weekends in clubs.
Richard Clayderman
#8. Classical music's ability to translate emotional themes is fantastic.
Alan Price
#9. 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.
Herbie Hancock
#10. I don't know if it's a sign of all the chaos that is happening out there or not, but I've lately craved the structure and order of classical music, the balance and symmetry.
Helen Reddy
#11. I think one of the reasons it ended was that his eyes never lit up for me the way they did for classical music. I realize that in the long run I may not be as wonderful as a Brahms symphony but I think I'm good for a Haydn quintet.
Daniel Handler
#12. I fell in love with funk music through my father - Funkadelic - as well as soul and classical early on.
Miguel
#13. I enjoy bluegrass, folk, gospel, and classical. I don't listen to music when I write. I sometimes listen to music just before I sit down to write.
Kent Haruf
#14. Drink a cup of herbal tea, if you like. Listen to some soft classical music and prepare yourself to drift
Robin S. Sharma
#15. I'm everything I'm made of. So a part of me is made of classical music. I'm grateful for it.
Ledisi
#16. I like classical music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and I adore Bach above all.
Gregory Maguire
#17. You think about, like, [20th-century classical composers] Alban Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern sitting around in some living room in Vienna and being like, "We are the end of music. We are the end of this tradition. Music is done."
David Longstreth
#18. 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
#19. A cough is the basic sign of inattention. Musicians never, in my experience, cough when playing in public.
Charles Rosen
#20. I would like for people to not be stuck by the rules of what is expected of a classical musician. If you really want to do something different, don't be afraid to do so. Think of music itself and not the rules or expectations of people.
Charlie Albright
#21. I would have to say I might do some stuff, but it's the film that's appealing. I was raised on film. My musical experience is all via film, it's not from classical music.
Danny Elfman
#22. 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
#23. Growing up with country, R&B, gospel, and classical music from my grandmother and pop, Tuskegee was the perfect melting pot for my influences as a writer.
Lionel Richie
#24. I grew up with classical music when I was a ballet dancer. Now when I have to prepare an emotional scene, to cry or whatever, I listen to sonatas. Vivaldi and stuff. It's just beautiful to me.
Diane Kruger
#25. I love art, I love music. I can listen to Stockhausen and a very experimental, avant-garde approach, and I can listen to Beethoven and have a more classical, traditional approach. Why not be able to do that with film performance?
Nicolas Cage
#26. As a really young child, I was listening to the echoes of the age before, music hall and stuff like that, as well as classical bits on the radio.
Roy Harper
#27. Indian food is like classical music raga- it takes time to build up to a crescendo.
Shobhaa De
#28. 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.
Serj Tankian
#29. Sometimes I just listen to classical pieces of music to take me away from my work. That's what I kind of do to wash away the notes that I've been working on all day. As human beings we need to sleep so that's kind of one of my little tricks.
Aaron Zigman
#30. Whenever I visit a city, I like to see what classical music concerts are on offer.
Park Chan-wook
#31. I started singing when I was five. I grew up the youngest of four kids who all studied classical piano, so you could say I've been listening to music ever since the moment of conception.
K.d. Lang
#32. My influences are jazz, blues, European classical music; they are rock music and pop music. So many kinds of music. World music from different countries like India and China. I think that would be a shame not to take advantage and do something ... not unique, because I don't have this pretension.
Rokia Traore
#33. To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that's not what I play. I play black classical music.
Nina Simone
#34. Classical music is an unbroken, living tradition that goes back over 1,000 years, and every one of those years has had something unique and powerful to say to us about what it's like to be alive.
Michael Tilson Thomas
#35. I'd been trained as a classical musician, but also as a pop musician. My teacher made sure that everything was available.
Jeanine Tesori
#36. What is classical music if not the epitome of sensuality, passion, and understated erotica that popular music, even with all of its energy and life, cannot even begin to touch?
Lara St. John
#37. In these confused times, the role of classical music is at the very core of the struggle to reassert cultural and ethical values that have always characterized our country and for which we have traditionally been honored and respected outside our shores.
Lorin Maazel
#38. I got my interest in Lotte Lenya and the Brecht-Weill canon from my parents. And I love classical music - I got that from my parents. I love Cole Porter - that I got from my dad.
Marianne Faithfull
#39. I think the classical music is on a dangerous downward slope, because it's not seeking strong enough resonance with its society.
Laurence Equilbey
#40. All music is dance music. But when people think of dance music, they think of techno or just house. Anything you can dance to is dance music. I don't care if it's classical, funk, salsa, reggae, calypso; it's all dance music.
Afrika Bambaataa
#41. A classical LP was playing ...
... Jealous and sweet, this music was, sobbing and gorgeous, muddy and crystal.
But if the right words existed
the music wouldn't need to.
David Mitchell
#42. Every so often, I feel I should graduate to classical music, properly. But the truth is, I'm more likely to listen to rock music.
Tony Blair
#43. The realm of classical music is so vast - not only in terms of style but of era, age and the purposes for which it was composed - it is an enormous art form.
David Finckel
#44. I can always invent movement, and sometimes it can be fitted into the right place, but that is not choreography. It is the music that dictates the whole shape of the work. I do not believe in the permanence of anything in ballet save the purely classical.
George Balanchine
#45. Classical music is a special taste like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand.
Allan Bloom
#46. The classical music is soothing and stimulating, good for thinking.
Rolonda Watts
#47. It is so important for people at a young age to be invited to embrace classical music and opera.
Luciano Pavarotti
#48. The tradition of classical music and the opera is such that it used to be the place where social intercourse could take place between all parts of society: politicians, industrialists, artists, citizens, etc. That tradition, I think, still exists, but it's much, much more diluted.
Yo-Yo Ma
#49. Do you think if two people liked the same thing, it could bring them closer together?"
"Certainly ... Take classical music, for instance ... Two people who shared a love for Beethoven could become very close ... "
"How about TV?
Charles M. Schulz
#50. My Dad died during the flu epidemic in 1918 when I was 4 years old. He left a lot of classical recordings behind that I began listening to at an early age, so he must have been a music lover.
Tom Glazer
#51. Sometimes in the great soundtrack of our lives there are no words, there are only emotions; I believe this is why God gave us classical music.
Anonymous
#52. My mother was an opera singer and my grandmother a concert pianist, and they only liked classical music. If I put on a pop record, they would tell me to turn it off, so I only listen to classical.
Amanda Eliasch
#53. I can think and play stuff in classical music that possibly violinists who didn't have access to other types of music could never do. It means I'm more flexible within classical music, to be a servant to the composer.
Nigel Kennedy
#54. 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
#56. My father was the proprietor of a music shop on Forty-third Street, where many of the finest performers and musicians of the day would come to shop. He knew the classical repertoire inside out.
E.L. Doctorow
#57. We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.
Patti Smith
#58. Sometimes I'll listen to a little old Van Halen, or some Beatles, Zeppelin stuff, classical music ... I like a lot of different things.
Eric Carr
#59. 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
#60. I am a massive fan of early electronica like Steve Reich, Pat Metheny and Thomas Dolby. I used to be a big raver, too, so anything dance. I love ambient music like Tunng. I love acoustic and classical, too.
Kate Fleetwood
#61. A good deal of classical music is, today, the opium of the good citizen.
George Steiner
#62. In the olden days, I believe Mozart also improvised on piano, but somehow in the last 200 years, the whole training of Western classical music - they don't read between the lines, they just read the lines.
Ravi Shankar
#63. I think music gives so much inspiration. I listen to all kinds of music: pop, hip-hop, everything. I also love classical music.
Nicki Minaj
#64. In contrast, traditional classical music starts from an abstract musical schema. This is then notated and only expressed in concrete sound as a last stage, when it is performed.
Pierre Schaeffer
#65. The basic difference between classical music and jazz is that in the former the music is always graver than its performance - whereas the way jazz is performed is always more important than what is being played.
Andre Previn
#66. There are so many people who are interested in classical music. Fortunately, I think many of them are quite young, so it's wonderful to present new programs to them.
Rafal Blechacz
#67. Most people don't listen to classical music at all, but to rock-and-roll or hillbilly songs or some album named Music To Listen To Music By ...
Randall Jarrell
#68. We were very rich culturally. One Sunday each month, we would do this thing called Chamber Pots at somebody's house. A classical music group would come over and we'd have dinner. There were thirty people - parents and kids - and we'd sit on the floor and listen to this beautiful music.
Kristin Davis
#69. Most of the music I've become interested in is hybrid in its originsClassical music, of course, is unbelievably hybrid. Jazz is an obvious amalgam. Bluegrass comes from eighteenth-century Scottish and Irish folk music that made contact with the blues. By exploring music, you're exploring everything.
Edgar Meyer
#70. If Music is a Place
then Jazz is the City, Folk is the Wilderness, Rock is the Road, Classical is a Temple.
Vera Nazarian
#71. So from Jazz, Blues, R&B, Soul, Classical and Country music, Hip Hop has introduced us to a little bit of everything.
B.J. The Chicago Kid
#72. I've never been really interested in music, classical or otherwise, where the craft is more important than the result. I realized quickly that I'd never be a technical electronic musician.
Anna Meredith
#73. Rock and roll was my favorite, but before long I grew to enjoy Shinamoto's brand of classical music. This was music from another world, which had its appeal, but more than that I loved it because she was a part of that world.
Haruki Murakami
#74. Classical music is far from boring - it has all the blood, energy, the sinister dark side, rhythm that rock music has, and all the refined, subtle sensuality that one can ask for
Yuja Wang
#75. 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.
Pete Seeger
#76. The Mozart Effect comes to mind: the popular idea that listening to classical music makes students better at math.
John Medina
#77. I started listening to classical music when I was in my early teens. Prior to that, I listened to pop records or band records.
Stephen Sondheim
#78. I loved 'Fantasia' as a kid because it filled me with wonder, enchantment and awe. It was my first real introduction into classical music. It was totally inspiring to me.
Nicolas Cage
#79. There was that sound again
snap, then a footfall. She tried to whirl around as a dark form
Dear God
sprang with a splash from the darkness
grabbed her from behind, shoved her under the water.
Kaye George
#80. I was fairly poor but most of my money went for wine and classical music. I loved to mix the two together.
Charles Bukowski
#81. As far as doing TV, I do think there's a big audience out there that could enjoy classical music, but they don't know how to find it, and sometimes by doing different things ... crossover things probably make up about 5% of what I do.
Joshua Bell
#82. Music is like comedy in that you can enjoy a very - for want of abetter word - sophisticated classical piece as much as you enjoy something that's very simple pop.
Kate Bush
#83. I was interested in both Western and Indian classical music.
Satyajit Ray
#84. Contrary to popular opinion, classical music does not have to be enjoyed amid exclusive circles, there need not be any snobbishness attached to it. It's there for everyone. I play for the people.
Andre Rieu
#85. In a way, the history of jazz's development is a small mirror of classical music's development through the centuries. Now jazz is a living form of original music, while classical music has gotten to the end of its cycle in terms of exploring its form.
Mike Figgis
#86. I listen to classical music very much. There's a lot of jazz that I don't enjoy listening to.
Lee Konitz
#87. I've always been fascinated by music and sounds. I was lucky to receive proper classical training as an orchestra player and I'm always learning as a composer, looking to create new flavors and colors.
Lior Ron
#88. I have a very varied taste in music. Everything from rap to classical to Latino to Rat Pack to jazz.
Jasper Fforde
#89. I'm pretty optimistic about the future of rock ... it will be back to composition as in classical music or jazz.
Jimmy Page
#90. When I began competing with the other artists in New York, I discovered classical North Indian music.
Henry Flynt
#91. From the spiritual came the blues, gospel, and rhythm-and-blues. I heard all of that music growing up, and that has influenced how I approached classical music. I'm sure of it.
Kathleen Battle
#92. But classical music is not entertainment, and I feel viciously strong about that. Classical music is forever. Entertainment is something that is here today, and may be gone tomorrow.
Van Cliburn
#93. Classical music only really came into my life in 1969. I wish I had heard classical music and church music when I was a teenager or even as a child.
Ian Anderson
#94. Classical music gradually lost popularity because it is too complicated: you need twenty-five or thirty skilled musicians just to hum it properly. So people began to develop regular music.
Dave Barry
#95. I definitely want to act, but I also want to score movies, and I have this idea to fuse classical music with other styles that would give it a different perception.
Alicia Keys
#96. The classical music scene was completely unfamiliar to me. It was something that I didn't have the most fun associations around. A lot of people don't - they think of older generations and stuffiness. But it's not. You listen to the Overture of 1812, and you can hear a rock n' roll catharsis.
Lola Kirke
#97. Right now I'm listening to a lot of different things but I listen to a lot of classical music. Eventually I would like to compose and perform classical.
Ben Harper
#98. The origins of Indian classical music, not unlike their western counterparts, lie in the Vedas, the ancient Hindu scriptures of 2,000 years ago.
Tariq Ali
#99. I like to stick with music I know I can play. I love classical, but I don't think I could ever play it. I'm just not qualified.
Willie Nelson
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