Quotes About Music From Bach

#1. I can take any series of numbers and turn it into music, from Bach to bebop, Herbie Hancock to hip-hop.

Donald Byrd

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. All Bach's last movements are like the running of a sewing machine.
(on Bach)

Arnold Bax

#7. Bach's music is really some of the greatest. I think, in some ways, Bach is the most profound composer of all.

Joshua Bell

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. I have always kept one end in view, namely ... to conduct a well-regulated church music to the honour of God.

Johann Sebastian Bach

#11. 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

#12. You have got to make new music, that is the way that I look at it anyway.

Sebastian Bach

#13. To wake up one day and be Steinway and Glen in One... Glen Steinway, Steinway Glen, all for Bach.

Thomas Bernhard

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. I listen to music for emotion and I get zero emotion from rap.

Sebastian Bach

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. I like classical music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and I adore Bach above all.

Gregory Maguire

#26. What is music for? It's to make you feel good.

Sebastian Bach

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. 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

#30. If all the music written since Bach's time should be lost, it could be reconstructed on the foundation which Bach laid.

Charles Gounod

#31. 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

#32. I write my lyrics into the computer and I hum my music into the dictaphone.

Sebastian Bach

#33. What I have achieved by industry and practice, anyone else with tolerable natural gift and ability can also achieve.

Johann Sebastian Bach

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. 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

#37. If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is certainly God.

Emil Cioran

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. 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