Quotes About The Cello

#1. Actually, music gave me the support when I needed it. I would never have gone to college unless I'd gotten a piano scholarship. And now I'm so glad I got to learn to play the cello, which is a different experience, you're flexing a different muscle, but it's beautiful because it is music.

Jamie Foxx

#2. I don't want to discredit people's opinions of me, but you talk about the violin or the cello or lead guitar where you have to learn tons of chords, that's much more difficult.

Bonnie Raitt

#3. But in my family, playing music was still more important than the type of music you played, so when after a few months it became clear that my love for the cello was no passing crush, my parents rented me one so I could practice at home. Rusty scales and triads

Gayle Forman

#4. If we just stick to one kind of music, our creativity is limited. We wanted to extend the audience for the cello, especially the younger people, and to show them how cool and how powerful and how diverse the cello can be.

Stjepan Hauser

#5. The range of the cello is so big, it can play as low as the double bass and as high as the violin. It has the perfect shape, and its sound is the closest to the human voice.

Luka Sulic

#6. When I was four, we had to choose a musical instrument to play at school, and I chose the cello. I played until I was 18, and although I found it nerve-racking to play solo, I loved playing in an orchestra. When I left school I didn't carry on with it, which I regret.

Emilia Fox

#7. It is the closest instrument to the human voice, and the things you can do on the cello ... there are endless possibilities.

Stjepan Hauser

#8. We were never happy with the way cello was recorded, and we wanted to experiment in the studio to make the cello rock as much as possible. On the second album, we had great help from Bob Ezrin, who helped us develop our sound even more.

Luka Sulic

#9. Thank God, I'll never have to play the cello again.

Pablo Casals

#10. I worry about technical details - did I mix the cello half a decibel too high? Things like that.

Steven Price

#11. The cello is not one of my favourite instruments. It has such a lugubrious sound, like someone reading a will.

Irene Thomas

#12. Even in classical music, the cello doesn't get a lot of respect because the piano and the violin get it all.

Luka Sulic

#13. The cello is a hero because of its register - its tenor voice. It is a masculine instrument, whereas the violin is feminine because of its soprano pitch. When the cello enters in the Dvorak Concerto, it is like a great orator.

Mstislav Rostropovich

#14. Why is it that we understand playing the cello will require work, but we attribute writing to the magic of inspiration?

Ann Patchett

#15. I'd always believed that the cello was a solitary instrument, but now I was starting to wonder if maybe I was the solitary one.

Anonymous

#16. It is my aim, my destination in life to make the cello as beloved an instrument as the violin and piano.

Mstislav Rostropovich

#17. The paintings are more about physicality and gesture than meditation. I'd compare it to playing scales on the Cello - each sound (pitch and intensity) depends on the manner in which you hold and apply the bow. The same goes for the gesture of applying paint to a surface.

Stephen Beal

#18. There's that thing that can happen to you when you meet somebody and you don't consider them extraordinary at all and then they do something like play the cello or write amazing poetry or sing and suddenly you look at them completely differently.

Yvonne Prinz

#19. I love the cello, I love the physical sense of an instrument that's about the size of your body that vibrates enough that even if you play an open string, you feel it.

Tod Machover

#20. If God had designed the orchestra, then the cello was His greatest accomplishment.

Rick Moody

#21. When I started learning the cello, I fell in love with the instrument because it seemed like a voice - my voice.

Mstislav Rostropovich

#22. Playing the cello did feel nicely neolithic, or at least a civilized way to process the primitive.

Eric Siblin

#23. I'm always anxious in introducing sounds that don't originate with the cello.

Julia Kent

#24. People tend to eat through the cello. They tend to take out the things that make it beautifully cello-y sometimes.

Julia Kent

#25. I learned the cello , but I would still need a massive amount of practice. But I do play classical music, so I understand where that comes from.

Alicia Keys

#26. The cello is such a versatile instrument. It can rock like the hardest rock guitar, and it can sing like the human voice. We couldn't do what we do without the classical training. It's a hard instrument to play. There are no frets, and it takes finesse and technique to play.

Luka Sulic

#27. I think a double bass for me would be too much effort. But the cello, you're really engaged and the sound is kind of right here. So, it feels like being merged, married to an instrument.

Tod Machover

#28. I did a film that's on YouTube of me reading hate mail with a woman playing the cello in the background.

Richard Dawkins

#29. Now, we are still learning how to approach girls, you know, learning what to say, etc., because the practice we've had was with our other girl, the cello. If you noticed, it has the shape of a female.

Luka Sulic

#30. I often play on the cello-bass side of the orchestra, because I prefer the deep sounds. I can't hear the violins well.

Evelyn Glennie

#31. People don't think of cello as a rock instrument, really, and we want people to know all the possibilities that the cello can offer.

Luka Sulic

#32. I would like to learn to play the cello. I would like to paint. I would like to fully understand the concept of pi.

Julia Roberts

#33. My mom says that my dad coerced me into choosing the cello. He says that's not entirely true. I don't remember; I was three.

Joshua Roman

#34. If I were to run around the world playing just the cello concertos - and believe me, I love playing them - I would be counting my entire repertoire from year to year on my two hands

David Finckel

#35. We wanted to make a powerful cello sound in order to show to the world the possibilities of the cello and to use it in a different way than the classical way they are used to. We wanted to play something exciting, something crazy, something to draw younger generations to this great instrument.

Luka Sulic

#36. It started when I was eight years old. I first heard the cello on the radio, and I loved the sound. It was such a magical, beautiful sound. I dedicated my entire childhood to cello, practising like crazy.

Stjepan Hauser

#37. I was a rebel and I wanted to do something that nobody else did, and nobody else played the cello. Also, I was also a small kid and I liked the fact that it was big.

Maya Beiser

#38. The cello is such a melancholy instrument, such an isolated, miserable instrument.

Ritchie Blackmore

#39. There are a lot of ways to be expressive in life, but I wasn't good at some of them. Music, for instance. I was a distinct failure with the cello. Eventually, my parents sold the cello and bought a vacuum cleaner. The sound in our home improved.

Sam Abell

#40. I started to play noise on my cello because I felt a deep personal connection to it. I mean, I still love all the beautiful sounds of the cello as much as anybody but it's only when I play certain sounds I know that the cello really presents who I am; not my emotions but who I am as a person.

Okkyung Lee

#41. Sometimes I did feel like I came from a different tribe. I was not like my outgoing, ironic dad or my tough-chick mom. And as if to seal the deal, instead of learning to play electric guitar, I'd gone and chosen the cello.

Gayle Forman

#42. The cello is like a beautiful woman who has not grown older, but younger with time, more slender, more supple, more graceful.

Pablo Casals

#43. I studied the cello for a long time, from when I was little up through college.

Lev Grossman

#44. We are so excited to be touring and showing audiences the versatility of the cello.

Stjepan Hauser

#45. I guess I'm interested in pushing the boundaries of the cello without giving up on the idea of playing the cello, if that makes any sense. I have no real interest in putting the cello through different effects to make it sound like a guitar or other instruments.

Okkyung Lee

#46. I enjoy singing, and the instruments which truly move me are the horn, the trumpet and the cello.

Roger Bannister

#47. I am dying: it's a beautiful word. Like the long slow sigh of the cello: dying. But the sound of it is the only beautiful thing about it.

Sonya Hartnett

#48. I enjoy practicing law too much to even contemplate retiring, but I often think about engaging in serious study of the history of art, of the intricacies of classical music. I could write a fugue, or perhaps learn to play the cello.

Karen DeCrow

#49. I played the cello from when I was ten, and then I bought a guitar from the father of some friends of mine and played that for a while. And then when I was fourteen or so, I bought a guitar - a real nice one - in Durham, North Carolina, that I worked with up until I was about twenty-five.

James Taylor

#50. 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

#51. And then Adam Wilde shows up at Carnegie Hall on the biggest night of my career, and it felt like more than a coincidence. It felt like a gift. From them. For my first recital ever, they gave me a cello. And for this one, they gave me you.

Gayle Forman

#52. Leala's breath was "like a cello sawing away against the bouncing-bow contrabasses of her heartbeat.

Ella Leya

#53. A cello can sound like so many instruments, but it's only one, you know, like a guitar; it has percussive qualities. It can sing like the violin, you know, like a voice.

Luka Sulic

#54. I decided that I wanted to explore all kinds of music with my cello, not just the Western classical tradition. I just wanted to try and expand my vocabulary and bring that different kind of music to my audience.

Maya Beiser

#55. I want to create endless possibilities with this cello. I become the medium through which the music is being channeled.

Maya Beiser

#56. I used to practice cello while watching TV and films. I watched several complete TV series this way, including 'Lost' and 'The Wire.' As a kid, I'd read books while playing.

Joshua Roman

#57. I love him as well. It's the same kind of love. But I can't say it. I won't be able to say it.

Tohru Tagura

#58. The viola and the clarinet made for an interesting pairing: we had to imagine the accompaniment of other instruments, ideally a violin and a cello.

Nicholas Christopher

#59. With that incredible voice that he [Alan Rickman] could play like a sort of wonderful instrument, like a cello or something. He played his voice, and he could be the most subtle of actors. And he could also be quite a big actor. He could do the grandiose performances as well.

Helen Mirren

#60. We tune differently, and we use some tricks. There's just the two of us for much of a concert, so we want a big sound. We do use some guitar effects, distortion and delay. Playing cello with distortion sounds so good.

Luka Sulic

#61. We also learned our own history and I was so grateful that such richness comes from our family stories. Now we will forever remember the day that a Russian cellist spoke the heart of Czech people. Rostropovich loved Prague and so he viewed that performance as a personal tragedy.

Kytka Hilmar-Jezek

#62. It has endless possibilities, and but what we do with our arrangements, we move the borders of cello playing and discover new ways of new techniques of cello playing.

Luka Sulic

#63. A cello on a winter night in the midst of a frozen city - that was what his voice sounded like.

Tiffany Reisz

#64. My mother adores singing and plays piano. My uncle was a phenomenal pianist. My brother John is a double bassist. I used to play the piano, badly, and cello. My brother Peter played violin.

Fiona Shaw

#65. I'm a pretty good drummer. I'm pretty good at guitar, bass and piano. I can play accordion; I'm not virtuoso. I've played cello before. My sister played it, and I know how to play it, but I'm not the best. Violin is kind of the same thing.

Brendon Urie

#66. But you have to give your whole life to a cello. When I realized that, I went back to the guitar and just turned the volume up a bit louder.

Ritchie Blackmore

#67. Because in classical music cello is not regarded as a popular choice, it's always playing the long, boring notes.

Luka Sulic

#68. The Third Quartet I made the instruments in pairs - Two different pairs - Violin and viola, and violin and cello. They played very different things from each other all through the whole piece.

Elliott Carter

#69. No, but a cello is the perfect string bass for an accordion. Works with it beautifully.

Elizabeth Moon

#70. I remember a moment when the Prince went back to his old school, Grammar School in Melbourne, and slightly to his horror his old music teacher produced a cello.

Anthony Holden

#71. I belong to an improv group, I play cello, I have these phases - fencing, tae kwon do, baseball, ice hockey, boogie boarding in the summer, snowboarding in the winter.

Ty Simpkins

#72. You'd wait in the orchard for hours
to watch a deer
break from the shadows.

You said it was like lifting a cello
out of its black case.

Eduardo C. Corral

#73. There are limits to how much sound a cello can make. That's part of the framing of acoustical instruments. Finding what those limits might be, and then trying to suggest perhaps even the illusion of going beyond is part of that kind of effort.

Yo-Yo Ma

#74. The only weapons I ever had were my cello and my baton.

Pablo Casals

#75. Dieter walked a little ahead of the other actors, murmuring to his favourite horse. The horse, Bernstein, was missing half his tail, because the first cello had just restrung his bow last week.

Emily St. John Mandel

#76. The butter from Dorothy's' crumpet
Dripped into the bell of her trumpet.
Sweet young Edgar, eating Jell-O,
Dropped a spoonful onto is cello.

Angelica Banks

#77. Oh, a man with a guitar is nothing compared to a man with a cello! Girls really like the way that we handle our instruments.

Eicca Toppinen