Quotes About Classical Musicians

#1. 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

#2. It would have been more obvious to go into film, based on the generation before me, but the generation before them were all composers or classical musicians.

Robert Coppola Schwartzman

#3. Many classical musicians lack pulse and rhythmical strength and precision, so for us it was very important to acquire and learn those.

Luka Sulic

#4. 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.

Michael Tilson Thomas

#5. Musicians like to converse. There's always interesting conversation with musicians - with classical musicians, with jazz musicians, musicians in general.

Wynton Marsalis

#6. Artists, whether they're classical musicians or pop musicians, they have always been the reflection of society, and in many ways a healing part of whatever is wrong in society, and I think it's important for us to continue to do that, and I don't see enough of it today.

George Duke

#7. Classical musicians do this all the time. They want perfection. So they piece things together. Eight bars of this and six bars of that. Glenn Gould said that with a recording he wanted to make perfect versions of pieces.

John Abercrombie

#8. 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

#9. Kolkata is a musical city. What I like about people here is the lack of diplomacy. Some of the best Indian classical musicians belong to this place. Kolkatans do not go by fashion, but by passion.

Sukhwinder Singh

#10. Our caste was just three away from the bottom. We were artists. And artists and classical musicians were only three steps up from dirt. Literally. Our money was stretched as tight as a high wire, and our income was highly dependent on the changing seasons.

Kiera Cass

#11. Jazz stands for freedom. It's supposed to be the voice of freedom: Get out there and improvise, and take chances, and don't be a perfectionist - leave that to the classical musicians.

Dave Brubeck

#12. My brother had a house in Paris. To it came many Western classical musicians. These musicians all made the same point: 'Indian music,' they said, 'is beautiful when we hear it with the dancers. On its own, it is repetitious and monotonous.'

Ravi Shankar

#13. My parents are both musicians and made sure we all played music. My brothers and sisters all play instruments, so we'll get together whenever we can and play. We play a lot of classical music - you know, the good stuff.

Olivia Culpo

#14. I found that jazz musicians, possibly more than their classical counterparts, wear long-standing friendships easily and gracefully.

Andre Previn

#15. The type of music we know as classical music began with rich people hiring musicians or owning them in a way. Without funding, it's very hard to have this experience. Be it state money or private money, there has to be someone dedicated to raising the money.

Gael Garcia Bernal

#16. I'm a good role model. I have an amazing marriage, and it will be long lasting. I think I'm a good mom. I could run for office, no problem, because there are no skeletons in my closet.

Elizabeth Banks

#17. There are so many wonderful, wonderful musicians in the world, I cannot possibly make a distinction between the fact that they might play classical music, or bluegrass, or Irish traditional, or Indian music.

Daniel Hope

#18. Choas will come, calm will follow, and then it will start up all over again. The secret is to savor the ride.

Regina Brett

#19. But when I first got cancer, after the initial shock and the fear and paranoia and crying and all that goes with cancer - that word means to most people ultimate death - I decided to see what I could do to take that negative and use it in a positive way.

Herbie Mann

#20. Of course I knew The Band's Canadian keyboard player, the late Richard Manuel, but I didn't play that night because I was there as a guest with my record executives. People ask, "why didn't you play?" If I had known I was going to be playing then I would have been prepared for it.

Gordon Lightfoot

#21. ...water is to the land what blood is to the body.

Sam Torode

#22. My 20s were peaceful, privileged, but still I felt the desire to write angsty dramas.

Adrian Tomine

#23. We're passionate musicians, but we felt classical concerts were more like a funeral because nobody talked and everybody was dressed so conservatively. We thought that's kind of strange, because music is full of life! We thought we could break through that barrier with theater and comedy elements.

Aleksey Igudesman

#24. New beginnings and new shoots Spring again from hidden roots Pull or stab or cut or burn, Love must ever yet return.

Robert Graves

#25. Having bands in the NFL would take up seats. If you take up seats in the NFL, you're losing money.

LaMarr Woodley

#26. You become what you want to be, by consistently being what you want to become each day.

Richard G. Scott

#27. Some musicians play blues, others classical jazz or bluegrass. I like to play political roles because I can merge my political interests with my creative interests.

Jeffrey Wright

#28. I basically love classical music. I love a lot of musicians playing together and the whole culture of that, whether it's Indian or it's Western.

A.R. Rahman

#29. After the war, once the bop revolution had taken hold, there were all kinds of young musicians, talented young musicians, who were ready for this fusion of classical and jazz.

Gunther Schuller

#30. Good music comes out of people playing together, knowing what they want to do and going for it. You have to sweat over it and bug it to death. You can't do it by pushing buttons and watching a TV screen.

Keith Richards

#31. If income was directly proportional to technical proficiency and education, classical and jazz musicians would be some of the most affluent people in the world.

Robert Emerson Coleman

#32. Personally, I think young musicians need to learn to play more than one style. Jazz can only enhance the classical side, and classical can only enhance the jazz. I started out playing classical, because you have to have that as a foundation.

Doc Severinsen

#33. 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

#34. So many of the bands that influenced me growing up were English, even if I didn't realise it. English pop ruled the world in the '80s!

CeeLo Green

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. A cough is the basic sign of inattention. Musicians never, in my experience, cough when playing in public.

Charles Rosen