We’ve sourced some of the most interesting and thought-provoking Classical Quotes from Anat Cohen, Danny Elfman, Jillian Hervey, Arthur Peacocke, Manika. Each of the following quotes is overflowing with creativity, and knowledge.
My father knew classical music very well. Driving in the car, listening to the radio, he could name every composer, every movement, what piece it was. I was fascinated by the way he recognized who wrote what.
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.
I grew up as a dancer, and music and dance are so closely tied that in ballet class, you’re listening to all this classical music, and in modern class, you’re working with a live drummer. It was something that always made me feel really comfortable, and I’ve had a connection to since the beginning.
Classical philosophical theism maintained the ontological distinction between God and creative world that is necessary for any genuine theism by conceiving them to be of different substances, with particular attributes predicated of each.
My iPod will shuffle from rap to pop to rock to classical … It gets confusing!
The difference between religion and morality lies simply in the classical division of things into the divine and the human, if one only interprets this correctly.
Even back when I played ‘straight-ahead,’ I mixed it up. I played some free-form, classical adaptations, solo flute stuff. It was New Age in its own way.
Music in Africa is perceived so differently than Western classical music – it’s language and storytelling.
When I was young, I played the piano and studied classical music and jazz. I wanted to be a concert pianist, and if I’d devoted myself to it, I could have been. But it would have been too much work and a very lonely life.
Many fail to realize this great recording industry was built by so-called jazz artists. And at the other end of the spectrum, a base in European classical music as well.
My parents loved classical music. And my father adored Mozart. But for some reason, I always had a reaction against it.
I’m not going to choose between classical, Broadway or pop. I would love to stay where I am now – a mix of everything.
I had a big background in listening to classical music and I started trying to compose, like I was playing the guitar but I heard an orchestra in my head.
My father was a classical musician and my mother was a writer.
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.
Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.
I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.
My first dance class was with Shiamak Davar when I was seven-eight years old. My mom insisted that I start learning to dance early because she’s a trained classical dancer.
My singing is not Hindustani classical or too western. It is a balance of Indian and western music. That’s the kind of music I grew up on.
A well-rounded performer will listen to all kinds of music. I like classical, Middle Eastern, and rock a lot.
When I was younger, I always wanted to be either a pianist or a classical singer, and when I discovered songwriting, it was like a new portal had been opened.
I come from a very strenuous, strict, disciplined classical music background. My grandfather, noted Carnatic classical exponent Dr. Sripada Pinakapani, was a Padma Bhushan recipient.
I was raised with a lot of classical music. I loved ballet. I was a bun head for 10 years.
The two designs are completely different. The first is totally futuristic, the second is more classical. You can of course get very excited about doing something completely out of the ordinary, just like the Olympic stadium in its time. But each to his or her own taste.
I did classical music when I was a teenager, but the experience of performing a classical concert felt too frighteningly pristine for me to continue with it.
When I need some energy in the morning I can put a metal CD in my player, because it gets me going! Classical music will send me off the road!
I played classical as a kid.
Classical dance is a growing and ever-evolving art.
By 1970, the first stirrings of the revolt against Modernist orthodoxy in architecture had been felt, although it would be several years more until Postmodernism was widely accepted and made classical motifs permissible in high-style building design for the first time in decades.
The only outlet in mainstream culture for classical and more experimental music to be heard is through movie soundtracks, and they’re such a wonderful display of emotion. I think the guy that did that best is Stanley Kubrick, working with Wendy Carlos who is an electronic composer.
My older brother Mike is an excellent trumpet player. By the time he was 12, he was playing around Kansas City in classical situations. He was already an amazing talent.
My purpose is to have American Jews look away from the success story with which they’ve cheered themselves up, and to have them remember the classical tradition, whatever it is.
You get used to being lazy doing films, but classical theatre’s going to finish me off.
I have observed, too, that the people of the many countries that I have visited are showing an ever increasing interest in the classical and traditional music of their own cultures.
I was brought up by my mother, and she is my guru in classical singing. I have trained primarily under her.
Many, many years ago, I was one of the few conductors who talked to the audience and now a lot of classical conductors have figured it out… otherwise, you just get the back of someone’s head playing music you could hear on a CD. It’s not enough anymore.
I wish I had given more time to learning classical singing.
I play a lot of classical music around the house.
I suppose I am more comfortable with jazz because I have been playing it that much longer, and also because classical music is a much more disciplined genre.
When you learn Indian classical music, sometimes it takes decades to perfect a raga.
Marxism is like a classical building that followed the Renaissance; beautiful in its way, but incapable of growth.
I really love sort of classical cinema where people were telling stories with very little dialogue, and people were using the camera in a really interesting way.
I started taking piano lessons when I was about 5, and there was always a lot of music in my family: my parents both play instruments, my grandparents were classical violinists, and my grandfather was actually a music professor and a conductor.
With my classical training and coming from a metal band, producers didn’t know what to expect. I like to shock people, though.
When I was doing theater for all those years in New York, I did a lot of classical theater, wearing big corsets and big dresses and doing dialects. It’s interesting that once I moved to TV, I’m playing these scrappy, contemporary toughies.
Seriously though, my father was the first African American to sign a contract with the Metropolitan Opera so I grew up with classical music and jazz in the home all the time.
I did classical singing at school. I did exams in that. I’d sing soprano, and we’d sing in German; we’d do Schubert for my pieces, in Latin, French… I really enjoyed that. I kind of miss it.
As far as rock groups, I really like Stone Temple Pilots. As for classical composers, it’s Bach. I love Paganini, too, the Italian composer who would break strings during a performance and finish playing on just one string. Someone I would have loved to play with is Jimi Hendrix.
I enjoy every role that I do. But I would love to do a dance-based film. It can even be the biopic of a great Indian classical dancer. I want to push boundaries.
It’s a scary thing going into the workforce with a $50,000 debt and you’ve been trained as a classical theatre actor. There’s always a depression in the theatre.
I have very eclectic tastes. I love soul and Motown; I listen to some rap – Stormzy, Tinie Tempah, Drake. I also love classical music, American country and the folk tradition. I often start the day with gospel on my way to work. The only thing I have never got into is punk.
I’m a classical type of guy. Whatever’s out at that point in time, I like it. I just put my own twist on it, and we go from there.
The training at Juilliard School is classical training, and it really makes one very versatile.
I would like to be as fit as I’ve always been. I’ve been blessed with good health, I’ve been blessed with stamina. Particularly for those great classical roles, you need an Olympian stamina. I, fortunately, have that.
If you looked at my iPod, you would get a trip out of all the different music, from the real heavy metal to bluegrass to classical.
People perceive opera and classical as elitist – I disagree. I’ve always tried to mix the two, make it more accessible.
I have a classical music background. I studied violin and trumpet.
Having started in theatre, for a long time I wanted to be a classical actress. But I’ve always loved making people laugh – at school, I was quite mischievous, and bit by bit, I found myself working more and more in comedy.
Apart from my work, my greatest pleasures have been mainly out-of-doors, and although I no longer ski, I greatly enjoy walking in the mountains and leading country rambles. I am fond of music, whether light or classical, and play the piano in a self-taught way. In company, I enjoy lively, way-out discussions.
I have loads of issues with the way classical music is presented. It has been too reverential, too ‘high art’ – if you’re not in the club, they’re not going to let you join. It’s like The Turin Shroud: don’t touch it because it might fall apart.
The clever, albeit fragile, coalition against terrorism brought together by the U.S. government might be able to advance the transition from classical international law to a cosmopolitan order.
When K. Vishwanath made the film ‘Shankarabharanam,’ he wanted to bring back Carnatic classical music to mainstream. It’s popularity was waning in those days.
Guided By Voices was huge when I was 16. Then I got into the Beatles, then classical music, Beethoven.
I used to sing classical music to the flowers in the garden and imagine they were all different parts of the orchestra. It used to really annoy the neighbours.
Jazz, for me, is a closed circuit, like the term baroque in the world of classical music.
Music has always been transnational; people pick up whatever interests them, and certainly a lot of classical music has absorbed influences from all over the world.
You could say that I had become possessed, in the classical sense, by the art of the great architects of the past. And that led me to engineering.
I can work across all genres of music be it classical, hip-hop, western, traditional or folk.
I used to dance for seventeen years -classical ballet, which was very disciplined. I like yoga and Pilates, but I don’t have the discipline to go to the gym.
In movies, the composers and decision makers are different, so we don’t come across classical songs often in films due to lack of interest. The decision makers are non-musical people, so one doesn’t get to hear more classical songs in films.
A lot of my training is in classical theatre; I’ve done a lot of classical plays in New York and also at the Guthrie and here and there across the country.
If we have to put music into baskets, then the progressive rock bands I fell in love with as a teenager made sounds that shaded into jazz, folk, metal, and in the case of the wonderful (and sadly missed) Jon Lord, modern classical music.
With ‘The Conjuring,’ I really wanted to create classical cinema-style film-making, pure cinema as it were.
When I was younger, I used to do that a lot: I would hear a part of a song that would really relax me and then put it on repeat. That would send me to sleep. It was quite obvious classical music, people like Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Erik Satie, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel.
I play piano and guitar. Acoustic guitar. I tried studying classical guitar when I was 16 but it got really hard. I could never play a lead to save my life.
My training has been in Hindustani classical, and I have done a six-week course in English vocals at Berklee. The holistic learning has helped me a lot.
Anyone who has passed though the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape.
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.
The lute I use has 10 courses and 19 strings, which is quite a lot of strings and a quite different fingerboard width from a classical guitar. I use a combination of flesh and nail when plucking the strings.
No, playing online is an entirely different experience and classical chess events never happen online.
When classical singers or dancers look at cinema with derision, I have half a heart to tell them that they’re wrong. They’re losing a platform.
The first four years, I worked exclusively in the theater. I did a great deal of different types of acting – avant garde and classical work. So, it was a very broad spectrum.
I reject the premise that liberal and libertarian values are necessarily in conflict. In fact, I often self-identify as a ‘classical liberal.’
One of the struggles that I have with classical music is the way one thinks about a recapitulation. There’s always this idea of themes, and I have trouble with that.
In classical times, it was a capital offense to speculate upon the hour of a king’s death or upon the identity of his successor.
I’m a self-confessed geek, and my whole concept of music at first was entirely electronic. In many ways, it turned out to be an advantage. I was so green, so utterly naive about the nature of classical music, that I did things that made me look totally, deliberately unorthodox.
I have sung as many as 6,000 songs of various hues, be they classical, pop or folk songs. I have even performed free of charge for the Maharashtra government.
I think doing variations on a classical theme is a dangerous thing to do.
I grew up mostly with classical, big band, and a lot of Irish music – I really didn’t start listening to rock and roll until I was maybe sixteen.
Deutsche Grammophon really has a grasp of the classical repertoire.
I studied classical guitar in school, and that type of stuff has led to writing for Kronos.
What’s the classical moment that every actor or actress deals with? A tragic thing. They get that blank, faraway look in their eyes. But in life, it’s not that way.
I don’t even listen to music on the road, and if I did, it would be classical or whatever, something to chill me out.
I’ve paid my dues in the classical trenches.
The most important application of quantum computing in the future is likely to be a computer simulation of quantum systems, because that’s an application where we know for sure that quantum systems in general cannot be efficiently simulated on a classical computer.
My parents signed me up for classical guitar lessons, which made for two years of the most depressing Wednesday evenings.
I was exposed to many kinds of music including rock and disco, classical and folk, Midtown and Miles Davis, Sly Stone and David Bowie.
I had to listen to the classical music because it calms me down, calms my nerves down.
I listen to jazz, Western classical, contemporary, Bollywood and heavy metal.
I don’t know if anyone knows if they’re ever any good, but I went to drama school in Scotland, in a classical acting course, and my first year, I remember one of my tutors telling me that I couldn’t act, and I should give up and all this sort of thing, and then, they cast me as Romeo in ‘Romeo and Juliet.’
I think Bond the character is distinct: He’s British, he has a certain code that he lives by, he’s incorruptible… he’s a classical hero, but he’s also fallible. He has inner demons, inner conflicts, and he’s a romantic.
My father started me off on the guitar, and we learned classical guitar together.
With classical ballet you are literally injuring yourself.
Obviously classical music tends to be stuff that is usually at least a hundred years old.
Piano was – well, all musical instruments were taught in this very rigid, formal, classical method when I was young.
I wanted to be Laurence Olivier, basically, to be a great classical actor, and also be able to do modern things.
My father was a classical singer of baroque music, and my older sister was in musical theatre, and I thought about doing the same thing but then realised straight acting was for me.
Classical cooking and molecular gastronomy should remain separate. You can mix two styles and get fusion; any more, and you just get confusion.
I think sometimes when you speak about something like ‘Indian classical music’ and ‘ragas,’ and all of that’s new to people, it can be quite intimidating, in the same way that I have sometimes found opera and Wagner intimidating – one doesn’t know where to begin sometimes.
I love classical music, but I hated classical guitar. But I like flamenco, because there was something else there going on. It wasn’t just the notes being thrown at you. And there were certain kinds of jazz that I really liked and other kinds that just went right over my head.
Classical heroes are usually much larger than life. They’re not quite human beings. They’re somehow larger than human scale.
I love classical music and often listen to symphonies or opera in the morning.
Humans are imperfect. That’s one of the reasons that classical and jazz are in trouble. We’re on the quest for the perfect performance and every note has to be right. Man, every note is not right in life.
For me, electronic music is the classical music of the 21st century.
Classical, Romantic, and Baroque music, that’s what I really like.
I would say ‘Home’ is a lot richer and deeper than my earlier classical.
Before I got the desired effect in my voice, I trained in classical music under my father for several years.
Alchemy is one of the good quote-unquote south-Asian experiences in that it has a wide variety of classical to experimental music.
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.
There is some brilliant pop music and some very poor classical music. And why shouldn’t comedy be treated as seriously as drama?
Live action writers will give you a structure, but who the hell is talking about structure? Animation is closer to jazz than some kind of classical stage structure.
There is this tremendous amount of arrogance and hubris, where somebody can look at something for five minutes and dismiss it. Whether you talk about gaming or 20th century classical music, you can’t do it in five minutes. You can’t listen to ‘The Rite of Spring’ once and understand what Stravinsky was all about.
I never thought I would sing or dance – ever, ever, ever. My idea was to be Laurence Olivier or Peter Lorre or some great classical actor. I thought I’d be a character actor.
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.
If it’s time to party, it’s time for hip hop. I love Drake, Jay-Z, Kanye. If I’m chilling at home though, I’m listening to Massive Attack, Thievery Corporation, Radiohead, DJ Shadow. I also listen to a lot of classical.
I taught myself until I was about 16. And then I studied classical guitar with some teachers.
Tony MacAlpine not only plays guitar, but is a stunning classical piano player, so he can show how that influence molded his guitar playing.
‘The Tudors’ was ground-breaking in the sense that it did ruffle the feathers of classical historians and alter the way people did period drama at the time.
As more people get into indie bands and alternative music, they’re also getting more into other genres that fit those categories, like jazz and classical. It’s becoming more rebellious to go to a classical concert. You’re getting the younger art house crowd and regular students as well as those who are just curious.
To me idealized characters are so boring to play, especially having grown up in the classical theater. That’s a great experience, but as a woman, especially, you’ve played a lot of idealized characters. So when you’ve got someone who has weaknesses as well as strengths, that’s interesting.
‘Hugo’ is made in the classical style of the 1940s.
See, modern dance forms have a pull because the youngsters can relate to it, but it makes me happy to say that in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, people still relate to classical art forms.
I just want to play like Jimi Hendrix. I love other forms of music and wish I could play classical piano, or saxophone like John Coltrane, but that will never happen. Because my nature is to play electric guitar really well and to emulate my heroes from the late 1960s.
As far as I was concerned the important thing was that the music was getting the attention as well as me so it was always a great way to get more of the public to connect with classical music, and opera particularly.
I play the piano and have been playing since I was 7, mainly classical Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart.
I’ve got a wonky nose. Is it classical, is it not? That’s what’s hard work, getting down into the nitty-gritty of who are the human beings behind the front of what they present?
I believe that classical music comes through listening and practice, and it can be fun both for the singer or performer and the listener or audience, as long as the performer is taught to recognise the pulse of the audience.
I am a trained singer in Hindustani and classical music.
Only directors like Sanjay Leela Bhansali, who make period films, have songs in their movies that facilitate the inclusion of classical dance forms. No one else is concentrating on making pure classical numbers.
I’m a classic English liberal. A classical liberal, which is different to the modern interpretation of liberal in America.
I’m a fan of many different styles of classical and symphonic music.
No genre of music is better than another, whether it’s country, hip-hop, trap, classical, whatever. It’s all music.
I’ve always said that I count myself as a classical crossover artist. To be so, you have to have the core classical training, which I did for many, many years, but also be interested in the pop side of things. You can fit in somewhere in the middle. I feel I do that really well.
I not only play at the prestigious classical concert halls like Carnegie Hall and Kennedy Center, but also hospitals, churches, prisons, and restricted facilities for leprosy patients, just to mention a few.
I used to be a very serious pianist, and I was one of the snot-nosed classical ones who was appalled by nightmares of Ethel Merman and trombones blasting in the background and who knows what else.
For many years, I’ve always been attached to what they call the Great American Songbook, and Kern was a great leader of that because he had the classical training of Europe. He impressed all the greatest composers, like Cole Porter and Gershwin. They couldn’t believe he was writing the songs he was writing.
The choreography in films is completely different. I find it easier when I am asked to dance to classical music, but it’s a different ball game altogether.
That’s the thing – you do a job like ‘Shameless,’ and suddenly that’s why you can get a job like ‘The Virgin Queen’, not because of all the classical theatre you’ve done. But we can be very snippy about television. It’s absolutely the most potent and powerful form of storytelling we have.
I go to metal concerts as well as classical concerts, and I love both of them.
The paradoxical War on Terror is based on a kind of willed stupidity; the willed stupidity of wishful thinking. Only the logic of dreamwork can suture ‘War’ with ‘Terror’ in this way, since terrorists were, by classical definition, those without ‘legitimate authority’ to wage war.
I have a varied collection of music on my phone. I like a lot of the popular music that has a really energetic beat to it, as well as some classical things.
The voice muscle doesn’t last forever. I have a lot of friends who are classical and opera singers. My friend Beverly Sills stopped singing in her 50s, so I’m careful with mine. But I’ll keep going as long as it lets me.
Jazz has been such a force in music, that any musician, including classical composers, have been influenced, and obviously performers, also.
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.
There is much more immediate access to creative music through online communities and blogs which have touched all corners of the music world including contemporary classical.
I love contrast in music. Being inspired by classical, actually – in high school especially – classical and metal both, I remember having this cool realization that they are really similar. It’s just different instrumentation.
I think there are people who use classical music to say, ‘I am better than you, because I know all the rules and you don’t.’ You’re not allowed to have fun or entertain.
My citizen activism is a direct outgrowth of a classical and fiscally conservative training in economics at Harvard. It is a perspective rooted in one of the most important concepts in economics – the need for government intervention in the presence of a market failure.
I studied classical music in high school.
I kind of lost interest in the classical dance. I was very much interested in the modern choreography.
I’m going to have classical piano lessons next.
I don’t think my background in Zambia has really affected my lens because my classical training has been Western-style. But it’s fantastically fortuitous to have been born African because I don’t feel I have a vested interest to the U.S. or China or wherever.
Although I enjoyed writing Film Music it was always a means to an end, in that it enabled me to keep a wife and family and write my classical music, which has always been my passion.
I played piano growing up. I played classical piano since I was 5, and I sang in choirs, and I sang in plays and musicals.
Regular church-goers are substantially more likely than non-attenders to read, to take newspapers and magazines, to listen to classical music, to attend symphony concerts, operas, and stage plays.
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.
When I began competing with the other artists in New York, I discovered classical North Indian music.
Classical music requires an immense amount of concentration, and I don’t know if I would’ve been that committed to that particular life.
They’re simply following what was laid down in front and they play the same thing. So, there’s no great challenge In being a classical drummer.
Yes, I tried to change the classical style in a way that people who don’t understand it can enjoy.
I love the Russian classics very much, the Russian classical literature. But I also read modern literature. As far as Russian literature is concerned, I am very fond of Tolstoy and Chekhov, and I also enjoy reading Gogol very much.
Actually, I try different kinds of exercise. I do functional training, Zumba, classical dance and walking.
I think it’s very important to maintain the classical Christian distinction between the Creator and creation.
I know Ornette was playing violin sometimes – that was his bridge into the classical world, to break up that whole pecking order.
I was raised on pop music. Anything classical ran together in a complicated blur.
I love hip-hop; I love Sleigh Bells. I also love classical music and musical theater.
The soundtrack for ‘Mr. Fraud’ is classical with a decent level of fusion.
I have experienced heartbreak but not in a classical sense.
I probably have the most versatile playlist in the world, from country to rap to classic rock to classical.
I was born and raised in Germany, so I was classically trained. Classical has been deep in me from a totally early age. Then, as a teenager, I picked up the guitar and was really into rock music.
There’s a great energy and drive that takes precedence in a lot of rock and pop. It’s about making a strong visceral connection. That’s something that I think great classical music can have, too.
Confidence is something I hope to instill in my son, Taylor, who is studying classical civilisation at Exeter University and is a brilliant hockey player. His mum and I have parted, but I have nothing but admiration for her.
I don’t think you can mix classical music and reggae. It’s not possible. But some producer in, like, Norway is going to put it together.
Much of Indian science seems intuitive and not bound by the rigid thinking of classical scientists.
I tend to listen to the classical composers: Rachmaninov, Satie.
Personally, I cain’t stand classical stuff, but I don’t tell the world about it. I just turn the radio off. Now, why cain’t these folks who don’t like my kind of music do the same?
When I was younger, studying classical music, I really had to put in the time. Three hours a day is not even nice – you have to put in six.
My parents met in music school and my father was a music professor and conductor. Growing up, we always had classical and contemporary music playing. There was a lot of Mozart and the Beatles.
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.
One of the problems that we face through the media attention that these artists receive is that there has been an awful lot of talk about opera and classical music being elite and being for an elitist group.
I like reading and writing, and I am a trained classical dancer.
My husband is a former rocker and in charge of our humungous music collection, and I’ve recently been asking him for classical music.
Jon Anderson and I, we really liked a lot of classical music, and we wanted to get some orchestral arrangements going on ‘Time And A Word.’
Until I was around 12 or 13, I only listened to classical music, mostly Tchaikovsky. But around that age, I started listening to Iron Maiden, and that’s when I purchased my first guitar, a pearl-white Westone.
I’m a self-taught guitarist, but I have a classical music background.
It was the early days of Rock ‘n’ Roll in this country. We were all struggling to learn music, it might be Country, Jazz, Classical, Blues or even Rock ‘n’ Roll.
I’ve studied classical singing, but not to a great extent.
I have never learned to read or write music so I am not a virtuoso musician like the others you mentioned. I am completely unable to play like them because I never learned classical music, I just developed my own crazy style!
I was just moving around the globe, learning classical music and generally doing nothing. I was completely away from glitz and glamour and did not miss it at all.
But I’d play on everything from pop records to a lot of the glam stuff to rock stuff to classical stuff. I used to get called to do all those things, it was great.
One way to become more attractive as an employer to millennials is to offer different kinds of contracts – not only the classical contract of indefinite duration, but also to be open to having more contractors and flexibility.
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.
‘The Shining’ is operatic and sensational and… really shocking. It has this amazing meld of classical music and modern interpretations of classical music, and incredible imagery. From the set design to the costumes, there’s so much to unpack.
It’s really funny how I’ve come round to classical music around the back door with my banjo in my hand, and I love it.
I call myself a liberal – a classical liberal as in John Stuart Mill.
I studied classical violin and voice until I was 18 and by then I had had my fill.
‘Homer and Langley’ is the work of E. L. Doctorow’s old age. There are fewer Homeric references than you might have expected, given that the narrator is called Homer Collyer and is blind, although, like the classical Homer, not born blind.
I wasn’t a jazz player, but a classical musician, and I improvised arrangements of popular songs using classical motifs.
There are a lot of classical musicians in my family, so I grew up with that being kind of normal.
My mother has learnt classical singing from renowned artiste Druba Ghosh at Sangeet Mahabharati, a music school. During my vacations, my father would sent me to this same school.
You go to a pop concert or a classical concert but there’s nothing in between.
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.
The patterns of big-band music are smooth and classical. It’s got to be fresh. The brass section should crackle, like the sound of eggs being dropped into hot grease.
If I switch on the radio and hear some nice classical music, I will sit and listen to it but I don’t sort of play records or go for any particular type of music.
I tried so many different musics. I kind of burned out on classical and wanted to make it fun again. I started playing with indie bands and country bands and finally realized electronic music brought my style to life.
My father was a classical pianist, and my mother was a singer of just about everything.
When you have rules to abide by, does that curtail you as a designer, or set you free? People think of classical architecture visually, but I think the brilliant part of it is actually spatial.
I don’t play classical guitar. But I do in my mind. I’ve got it on a stand.
When I was 20, Shostakovich was my favorite composer. I still find his Fifth Symphony wonderful, with its outstanding themes and rhythms. That’s the piece that made me want to be a classical composer.
I would not want the limitations held by the name of a classical musician. I want many people to enjoy my music much beyond just classical music fans. I think the term, ‘violinist,’ keeps me distant from the audience. I want to communicate with them more.
The beautiful thing about ‘Bhav’ is that it reaches out to a far more number than just the typical set of people who say they like classical music and dance.
I wanted ‘The South Bank Show’ to reflect my own life and that of the team around me; to stretch the accepted boundaries and challenge the accepted hierarchies of the arts; to include pop music as well as classical music, television drama as well as theatre drama, and high-definition performers in comedy.
I was a stage actor for 20 years or so; I was leading men in classical things. ‘Shakespeare,’ you know. And now, I never play leading men. I’m that kamikaze comic that comes from the left, turns the table over, and leaves, or the hyper-intelligent yuppie scumbag if it’s a drama.
I started playing music when I was about six and didn’t discover Indian classical music until I was fifteen. So, essentially, I had a lot of catching up to do.
When I was studying… there weren’t any black concert pianists. My choices were intuitive, and I had the technique to do it. People have heard my music and heard the classic in it, so I have become known as a black classical pianist.
Every description of natural processes must be based on ideas which have been introduced and defined by the classical theory.
My big influences are Joni Mitchell, and a lot of classical and Indian music, as well as Nina Simone and the personal blues and jazz of Billie Holiday. Other influences for me include Bjork, Nick Drake, and Sufjan Stevens.
In Elizabethan England or classical Athens… theater was at the center of, not culture, but society and politics and religion and civic engagement. Those things have a different audience.
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.
I don’t even want to say I’m trying to necessarily popularize classical music, I just want to take this thing, this cello, this sound, and make it artistic so people can understand it today.
I think that having a platform and having a voice to be seen by people beyond the classical ballet world has really been my power, I feel.
The Beatles are the classical music of rock n’ roll. And rock n’ roll is far more widespread than classical will ever be.
If you look at the history of music, you have classical composers, church music, pop music, etc. Music that’s existed for centuries. I think there are some songs that are close to immortal. They will last longer than we will in this lifetime.
The classical example of a successful research programme is Newton’s gravitational theory: possibly the most successful research programme ever.
The classical actor in England makes roughly the equivalent of a bus driver.
I am comfortable with anything I sing: jazz, gospel, classical. It doesn’t matter. I can do it all.
It’s hard to find an emblem of cultural, national pride that burns as bright as Israel’s success in classical music.
The classical music world is so snobbish.
In Florence, classical buildings sit against medieval buildings. It’s that contrast we like.
Why English music is being taught in some schools? The government should make arrangements to promote Indian classical music among students.
I keep myself open to singing in different genres like classical dance songs, light classical folk, etc. There’s so much to learn and I’m glad I’m on the right path.
I just wanted to go to New York and be on Broadway, but then I was accepted by Juilliard, where they trained me in classical voice. It was great in the end, but at the time, I thought, ‘What am I doing here? This is not my path.’ But it was absolutely my path and where I was meant to be.
If you love classical playwrights, seek out companies or places that are doing that. If you love modern playwrights, try to find groups who are writing new plays or working on new plays. If you love television, watch as much theater and film as you can.
Classical dance forms and music are slowly going away. It is very important to impart these to children.
The law of right-left symmetry was used in classical physics but was not of any great practical importance there. One reason for this derives from the fact that right-left symmetry is a discrete symmetry, unlike rotational symmetry, which is continuous.
I studied dance for about 15 years, various disciplines, with classical ballet as my primary.
As someone who’s been doing a lot of classical theater recently, I loved the idea of getting to run around in Steven Alan, and not be in a corset and a wig, and not have a dialect, and get to be in a 90-minute play with no intermission, and get to do real comedy.
Musical themes developing is a lot of what classical music is based on, and exposition and recapitulation – these kinds of things I find oppressive.
I found that jazz musicians, possibly more than their classical counterparts, wear long-standing friendships easily and gracefully.
I’m trying to learn classical piano, Mozart and Beethoven and stuff. I took lessons when I was younger and now I sort of sight read the music and play it by ear. It’s fun. It takes up a lot of time. I practice a couple of hours a day, but I find it soothing.
I express myself using my classical skills to write more complex forms of popular music.
I was born out of classical music.
The classical writers… playwrights, Jacobean, Elizabethan playwrights, all showed areas of all classes and how they live and painted them pretty authentically.
I wanted to give people – which is fairly bizarre considering my whole life is contemporary dance really – I wanted to give people a really fulfilling sense that they had seen a white classical ballet – in a very pure form.
I grew up in a family that was very musical, learned the blues and everything like that. And I became a little bit frustrated with the simplicity of rock n’ roll and blues. I started listening to a lot of classical music – mainly Bach, Vivaldi.
I love classical music. Yes, I was in a conservatory when I was younger and played guitar and all that stuff, so I also love rock.
To become a classical ballerina, you have to move to New York when you’re 12 or 11 and that becomes your life. I just wanted to be good in my company in Charleston and I wanted it to always be part of my life.
I had never watched a live classical performance before I came to Bengaluru. I feel like this is the New York of India – a melting pot of many cultures.
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.
I’m the product of the classical, old-fashioned European education that is broad-based. You want to get your degree in the world, you have to study all sorts of things.
I’m not a classical player. I don’t want to be a classical player. I love to improvise, because things happen that never happen anywhere else.
I’m always keeping an eye out for a period piece. I was trained in theatre, so most of the things we did were classical – Shakespeare, Moliere, and Chekhov.
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.
I grew up partially with classical music but listened to a lot of rock when I was young – I like acoustic, and folk from Mali and Armenia and Turkey.
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.
I listened to classical guitar and Spanish guitar, as well as jazz guitar players, rock and roll and blues. All of it. I did the same thing with my voice.
The heart of the classical repertory is the Tchaikovsky-Petipa ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ and no ballet is harder to get right.
Preachers at black churches are the last people left in the English-speaking world who know the schemes and tropes of classical rhetoric: parallelism, antithesis, epistrophe, synecdoche, metonymy, periphrasis, litotes – the whole bag of tricks.
I grew up listening to – it’s kind of embarrassing – all classical music.
I do a lot of vocal warmups, which are the same warmups I did when I was a kid, because I had a few classical singing lessons and stuff like that, so I know pretty much how I’m gonna be once I get on stage.
I think any classical training in the theatre is of enormous value.
I never took guitar lessons. I took classical piano lessons from the age of six when we lived in Holland.
I come from classical theater training and when I went to college it was a bunch of kids that were hand-picked from around the world. I was around such brilliant young minds and incredible artists with incredible teachers.
I grew up with classical music blasting in my parents’ living room and my older brother’s practicing saxophone in his room listening to jazz… a beautiful chaos.
My training in music has been very eclectic – as first a flute player from classical chamber music to jazz, Greek, Brazilian and African music to contemporary concert music.
But if you listen to great piano players, both classical and jazz, there’s a huge range of dynamics and colors and emotional expression that’s possible with the instrument.
Early on, I was a performer playing classical music. It’s in my DNA in a way that I can’t begin to extract it.
When you look at classical structures, they’re often linked to literature, music, or a poem. They were constructed by master builders, which means it’s not something standard that you can copy.
I wouldn’t call myself at all as a crossover artist – I kind of hate that word – but in a way, you need to see me like that, because I’m working in classical music, I’m doing these other projects, and I’m having a rock career at the same time.
My mom was an opera singer. She did all the classical music, and I heard it. I know every opera. I know every classical piece of music.
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.
I definitely try to broaden the scope of music. I don’t know if it’s pop or classical or what, but I’m religiously challenging myself all the time, for better or for worse.
Even in classical music, the cello doesn’t get a lot of respect because the piano and the violin get it all.
Even the most jingoistic person would have to admit that even American cultural music comes from Europe. That’s what classical music is, real European music.
I started playing piano when I was eight, and I went on to study piano in school, so I have a background in classical piano and studied composition in school. Writing music came later.
As far as using electronics in my music, I have to do that as honestly as possible. Also, I have a broad range of listeners from a classical music base, as well as people, like me, who listen to a lot of different music. So I’m mindful of letting my sitar playing remain at the center of what I do.
I want to do all kinds of things. I want to do some comedy. I’d love to do a romantic comedy, and I’d love to do some period pieces with classical text. I’d love somebody to cast me as Macbeth, but for a film. I just want to be all over the place.
I wanted to shred, so I learned classical guitar.
I’m thinking about learning a few new things – like taking classical guitar lessons – and I’d like to bring what I learn into hard rock.
Parallels between classical and pop are not new. The whole San Francisco movement of John Cage and Terry Riley went hand in glove with what the Velvet Underground were doing.
We have to go and show these people what classical music is. We say sometimes that classical music has a small audience, but it’s because people don’t have the chance to be closer to it.
I don’t think I’m good enough to bring alive the character of my mother, even if it is on screen. Besides, my mother was a classical dancer, and I am very bad at it.
I love classical jazz.
The view which regards man as a well, a reservoir full of possibilities, I call the romantic; the one which regards him as a very finite and fixed creature, I call the classical.
It was not a secret, then or now, that there is something vaguely un-American about forcing your child to be really good at classical music performance.
Classical music thinks in centuries, not four-year terms.
Popularity gets up people’s noses. But I understand the importance and the function of popular music. There is an artistic purpose. Popular music helps people to develop a curiosity and leads them towards classical music.
My family were all into classical music, and I found that very intimidating.
With classical singing you have to put out so much air – you project, you emit force.
I was lucky enough to get into drama school in London back in 2005, and I was there for three years, and in those three years, we did a lot of theater. A lot of classical training.
I do not support that everyone has to be a trained classical singer to be able to sing in films but some sort of knowledge in classical space can take you to places.
I started writing music as a composer in school, in the classical tradition.
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.
I just loved classical music, but I also loved playing rock guitar, and I loved playing piano, so it was a natural thing that those things would merge at some point.
When we started the band, it was a classical group.
I’m trained in classical music, and my favourites have always been rock n’ roll and blues, but I’ve grown up with different kinds of music around me because of my parents.
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.
I’d like to do some more classical work if I do some more theatre.
I like classical music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and I adore Bach above all.
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.
My whole life, I’ve always had one foot in the classical world and one foot in the rock, pop, and folk world.
I was 11 years old, and I had been playing classical piano for three years, and suddenly the guitar came and landed in my arms. I fell in love with that instrument, and I still love it today. I love it so much.
The major rock instruments and classical instruments were designed for performance, for sharing the music with an audience, and then later people put microphones on them and recorded them. But for electronic music, the opposite was true – they’re designed in laboratories, and later, we tried to put them on stage.
I think, until I was 16, classical music had just seemed like a little bit of a rhythmic wasteland for me. Coming from bluegrass, where one conducts oneself rhythmically, it seemed like such a different approach, and at that point the difference that I was noticing was a real turn off to me.
Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules… Mathematicians are more like classical composers.
If you actually saw your favorite movie star who is also a great classical actor doing ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ ‘Macbeth’ or ‘Taming of the Shrew,’ it would be a great thing and a great thing for kids to get interested in language.
The conservatory professors thought everything should sound like French and German symphonies. But to my ear, bouzouki songs, which tell the sufferings and heartaches of ordinary people, offered a way to make classical music available not just to the upper classes.
I’ve often taken important classical, biblical or literary stories and interrogated them. I have tried to reinvigorate Lot by interpreting it differently.
I love to play a character. If I’m playing Cinderella or Aurora in ‘Sleeping Beauty’ or something like that, then I enjoy classical a lot. But to do just a two-minute solo, purely to show classical aesthetic, is not my favorite thing to do.
I finished my university studies with classical music while being in a successful metal band, but that was not an easy task at all.
For us, it is all about breaking the boundaries between different genres of music and combining different styles of music and performing what we are passionate about. We are so lucky that we can experience both worlds: the more intimate classical world and the wild and crazy world of rock n’ roll.
I have never called myself an opera singer. Other people do, but I always call myself a classical singer. I’d love to do opera, but I’m still too young and I don’t want to do it until I’m ready. I realise that when I do that it’s going to be… up for discussion, shall we say, so I want to get it right.
Classical liberalism is the idea that individual freedom and limited government are the best way for humans to form a free society.
When working with classical musicians, it is important to be clear as possible in the score about what my intentions are. Because there isn’t a lot of rehearsal time, especially at the ballet, it’s best if everything is written in the score.
We are working on organising classical music festivals in a bid to promote qawwali there and produce films that promote music. Perhaps people lack the talent as yet, but at least there’s a stable platform available to promote this as an art form.
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.
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.
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.
It is not about classical career questions but about questions for your life. Those are the questions that drive you on as a human being.
It takes a lifetime and a half to master the classical guitar.
In the late 1960s, the New Classical economists saw the same weaknesses in the microfoundations of macroeconomics that have motivated me. They hated its lack of rigor. And they sacked it.
I can’t sight-read classical etudes – I would have to see it and learn it. But yeah, I can read. It is a wonderful tool. It’s like speaking another language. Anyone that says reading music can hurt your playing is either stupid, lazy, or ignorant.
We can compare classical chess and rapid chess with theatre and cinema – some actors don’t like the latter and prefer to work in the theatre.
Before college, I acted in my room, to classical music, because music tells stories. I’d put on a record and proceed, silently. I’d keep putting the needle back to a certain segment because I hadn’t died well enough. I had to really, really feel dead. I’d love to do a death scene.
I listen mostly to classical music.
I am compared to other classical musicians, but most of them perform songs from other people, and most of those composers belong to another era.
Usually people like experimental music which is usually not the case in Carnatic classical concerts.
Shakespeare’s naturalness is attested to by the strange fact that he is the only classical author who remains popular. The critical termites are massed and eating away at the foundations, trying to topple him. Whether they will succeed will be a test of his robustness.
Liu Fang is a truly gifted, world-famous player of the pipa and the guzheng, classical Chinese stringed instruments.
Cities are about juxtaposition. In Florence, classical buildings sit against medieval buildings. It’s that contrast we like. In Bordeaux, we built law courts right next door to what is effectively a listed historic building, and that makes it exciting.
In my 20s, I became obsessed with the role-playing game ‘Romance of the Three Kingdoms,’ named after a classical Chinese novel, and later ‘The Sims,’ a life-simulation game, and ‘StarCraft,’ a science-fiction game.
My basic grammar is in Indian classical music, Carnatic music, and Hindustani music, but I don’t believe that that is the only form of music I will learn. I don’t believe in that, because I am a very open minded person.
Before I was 5, I did have a lot of time on my hands. I had no job and really no career, and I spent an awful lot of time listening to records. It was more the classical ones, really – Prokofiev, and I think there was some Mozart in there, and more impressionistic composers like Delius.
Television has dried up for my generation, so it’s plays and films. You get used to being lazy doing films, but classical theatre’s going to finish me off.
I love classical music and have been playing violin since I was seven. Music helps me to express feelings in a way words often cannot.
While classical mechanics correctly predicts the behavior of large objects such as tennis balls, to predict the behavior of small objects such as electrons, we must use quantum mechanics.
In the U.K., classical music is composed by individuals and written down. Indian music is based on certain sequences called ragas. When I perform live, 95% of the music is improvised: it never sounds the same twice.
Someone who gave me a lot of confidence was my friend Martin Taylor, he’s the most famous man in Bolton. He is a pianist and used to play in one of the local pubs. He would sing everything from classical to rock to pop. He was amazing.
I am not doing something that it is experimental music in relation to classical music.
Though I played classical piano since age 5 and sang in a cappella groups, being an artist didn’t seem like something I was talented enough to do full time. So I kind of buried that dream.
We need to take music out of the ivory tower – both for musicians and for the public. Otherwise, classical music will not survive the 21st century.
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.
Anyone who knows classical music and loves classical music has heard the Beethoven Seventh hundreds of times probably in their life.
I’ve fallen in love with the classical world of imagery, and what I’d like to do now over the last bit of my life is to photograph some nudes.
I want an ending that’s satisfying. I’m more of a classical writer than a modernist one in that I want the ending to be coherent and feel like an ending. I don’t like when it just seems to putter out. I mean, life is chaotic enough.
It’s something he used to say when he was happy. It could be a very, very simple day. We might be sitting out on the front lawn. Dad loved classical music and we might be listening to some Stravinsky or something and having some tea and eggs. And he’d say, ‘Oh, good stuff, isn’t it?’
New music is absolutely integral to classical music.
But the key thing was that I knew of no other contrast between Wolverine as we understood him and Logan than you see in his behavior as a roughneck Canadian versus classical samurai society. That’s the dichotomy in his soul.
I really hope that I can continue to do classical theatre – it’s something I am really passionate about and I’d love to explore.
I had 10 years of lessons at the conservatory in Belgium, studying classical music. I learned how to sing, play the piano, and all the theory that I needed. By the time I left, I had confidence in my skills, and I knew that the experience had prepared me to become a real professional.
I like all kinds of music – classical, pop, rock, electronic.
I grew up with the Woodstock generation. I went to Woodstock, and like everybody in my school, I wanted to be in a rock-and-roll band, and most of us were. But I also grew up with a lot of piano lessons and a lot of classical music training.
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.
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.
I had classical training but I don’t consider myself an opera singer though.
Classical ballet is very extreme. You’re doing it six days a week, and it’s a kind of obsession of perfecting a move. So every muscle in your body has been stretched and tightened, stretched and tightened.
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.
If repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost.
I was part of a very uncool group. It was a group that liked classical music. They were known as the Music School Gang or, less charitably, the Poof Gang.
I don’t crave acceptance in the classical world.
Classical pianist Awadagin Pratt. I first heard this eccentric and introverted performer when I was living in the Midwest. He was playing Brahms ballades – haunting.
If it comes out sounding like Dixieland jazz or classical or punk or rock or even slightly metal, that’s because that’s where I’m going to find inspiration.
I play only classical music. My pianos are my only big indulgence, but they’re a necessity. When I’m playing the piano is literally the only time I can be completely abstract and disconnected from the regular world and yet be connected – to my music.
I think a lot of directors over the years have cast me because they see something of another generation in me: you know, certain people look like they’ve come from the 19th century. Because I have classical background I suppose that is more suitable to patriarchal roles and easily infuses them.
I studied classical percussion for ten years.
In my opinion, being an all-rounder is good. It is not right that I should be content with qawwali and ignore other forms, since I am basically trained in classical singing. We should be masters of all forms of singing.
A lot of people don’t know that my background is completely classical. For a while there, I was all about Moliere and the Greeks and Brecht and Tennessee Williams.
I do think that my Indian classical audiences thought I was sacrificing them through working with George; I became known as the ‘fifth Beatle.’ In India, they thought I was mad.
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.
Rock music has always embraced – and even represented – rebellion, rowdiness, and a robust disdain for social decorum. But along with more classical art forms like theater, opera, and the symphony, it’s suffering from the distracted, smartphone-carrying audiences of the digital age.
I love all types of music. Jazz, classical, blues, rock, hip-hop. I often write scripts to instrumentals like a hip-hop artist. Music inspires me to write. It’s either music playing or completely silent. Sometimes distant sound fuels you. In New York there’s always a buzzing beneath you.
I present classics in an unfamiliar way or unfamiliar ingredients and preparations in a classical way.
From the heaviest of the heavy to classical to country, that’s what I listen to, I listen to a variety and I enjoy good music, good songs.
Wherever and whenever I sing, if there is only one spiritual on a program, people will talk about two things afterward, and one of them will be the spiritual. What I bring to this is the best of my classical training – not all of it. I apply what is appropriate.
What’s different here is that we have now technologies that allow these life science companies to bypass classical breeding. That’s what makes it both powerful and exciting.
Me, who’s educated classically, I went toward rock music ’cause it was sort of a natural evolution from where I was playing with my brother. But I was always drawn back into classical music.
When I was at drama school I wanted to do classical theatre. It just so happened that I did a film when I came out and I moved that way.
Western classical music had long known syncopation. But no one had felt compelled to snap his fingers to music before American jazz and musical theater, which sent a previously undiscovered current coursing through the body, demanding outlet.
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.
When I was a young musician, the only option available to pursue secondary education in music was to attend a classical conservatory.
We have always played classical music and always loved dance and pop music.
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.
I write in the most classical French because this form is necessary for my novels: to translate the murky, floating, unsettling atmosphere I wanted them to have, I had to discipline it into the clearest, most traditional language possible.
I come from a small village and have had no formal training in music or any classes from the masters of Indian classical music.
In blues, classical and jazz, you get more revered with age.
It falls in all the cracks, from classical music to jazz,. Anywhere there’s a hole in the floor, my music falls through it. But that’s OK.
I did extensive, extensive recordings and made a classical CD-ROM set, which is still on the market. For ten years, it was by itself as the cream of the crop of samples.
My parents were decent, aspirant first-generation middle class. They read ‘Reader’s Digest’, listened to classical music; my grandparents had a bust of Stalin on the mantelpiece. The kids of that generation were terrified of being below par, class-wise.
In Germany, people feel like they own classical music, that it is somehow theirs. Over there, everyone still learns to play, and the great composers don’t seem alien.
As a kid, I would listen to anything that had a live orchestra or ensemble playing, so that covered everything from show tunes to eclectic jazz things to film soundtracks to classical music. They’re all inspiring to me.
The classical theory of omniscient rationality is strikingly simple and beautiful.
There was a stage when Balanchine and I didn’t talk. I was trying to develop my classical technique as opposed to the fast-track technique that he was pushing. We were very quiet with each other. But after two years he saw what I was doing and sent messages through other people that, yes, this is good.
There’s always been a slight twinge of some classical elements in our music.
Anybody can be a rapper, but not anybody can be a classical artist.
Students often have such a lofty idea of what a poem is, and I want them to realize that their own lives are where the poetry comes from. The most important things are to respect the language; to know the classical rules, even if only to break them; and to be prepared to edit, to revise, to shape.
Unlike settled, patriarchal societies such as classical Greece and Rome, where women stayed home to weave and mind children, the lives of nomadic steppe tribes centered on horses and archery.
I do like classical music, and soft rock, and jazz, which I never listened to when I was 15. Now I like it. The older you get, the more tolerant you get, right?
If you ever ask me what my all-time dream character is, my answer will be Mia Tansen, the great composer-musician in Hindustani classical music. And ideally, the film should be directed by a person like Bhansali who is a great director and has a marvellous sense of classical music.
I was constantly being pushed toward a European ideal of what it means to be a classical or opera singer, let’s say in the Renata Tebaldi mode. I reject that.
I had learned classical guitar when I was a kid, and I embraced it, and apparently I got good at it.
I abhor the words ‘classical music.’ Few things satisfy me more than a really good cover version.
I sit around listening to classical music. I don’t play video games. I love to go to dinner, go on picnics, travel.
I have been exposed to different kinds of Marathi and Hindi music, classical music, and English songs since childhood.
If had to label myself, I guess classical liberal would be best.
Yes, I have been studying piano since I was six. Classical, jazz, compositional, Broadway, everything. I just love it all.
I loved Hendrix. I mean, really, really loved him. As if he were one of the great classical composers. And he was. That’s how I saw him.
I have a great liking for the Chamba folk music, which depicts the beauty of women and the mountains with a touch of Indian classical music.
My parents being Bengali, we always had music in our house. My nani was a trained classical singer, who taught my mum, who, in turn, was my first teacher. Later I would travel almost 70 kms to the nearest town, Kota, to learn music from my guru Mahesh Sharmaji, who was also the principal of the music college there.
My dad was a really good classical guitarist. He took lessons with a student of Andre Segovia.
When I first got a guitar, it was a Spanish, classical thing.
Copland was the first important American classical composer to go to work for Hollywood.
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.
Classicism becomes avant-garde when everyone else is doing their utmost to develop new stylistic forms. I think it’s healthy to return to classical forms.
When I bowled to batters like Michael Vaughan or Jacques Kallis who were classical, technically perfect, sound batters, I always found that I could get them out.
Writing detective stories is about writing light literature, for entertainment. It isn’t primarily a question of writing propaganda or classical literature.
I took piano lessons as a kid, and my daughter’s played piano since before she started kindergarten, so classical piano is something I really love.
I want to keep doing interesting work with interesting people in whatever form that may take, but I want to play the big parts of classical theatre; I want to go on stage and play great Shakespearean roles and, at the same time, do amazing, challenging indie films and comedy, and I want to do it all. I am greedy.
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.
When I listen to music today, it is about 99 percent classical. I rarely even listen to folk music, the music of my own specialty, because folk music is to me more limited than classical music.
I could have taken the easy life and just done classical, but I felt very strongly about the album, my first pop album, the first time that I’d fused so many influences. I was very proud when it was in the charts in 25 countries at once.
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.
‘The Firebird’ just symbolizes a lot for me and my career. It was one of the first really big principal roles that I was ever given an opportunity to dance with American Ballet Theatre, and it was a huge step for the African-American community, I think, within the classical ballet world.
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.
By then, I was making the slow transition from classical biochemistry to molecular biology and becoming increasingly preoccupied with how genes act and how proteins are made.
A lot of people may not know how competitive it is to play classical music, because when you think about it, the music that you’re playing is music that’s been here for years. And all you’re trying to do is improve upon it when you play.
With rock music, the amount of power that you can generate, the intensity behind the intentions of your lyrics that you can really reflect through rock music – you can’t do that in jazz. You can’t do that with classical.
Economists of a classical bent lay a large part of the decline of employment, and thus lagging output, to a contraction of labour supply.
My movement is usually about finding the balance between artistry, athleticism, and musicality. It always originates with a classical basis and expands outwards from that platform.
I like classical music. I especially like the French composers: Ravel in particular. Debussy. That’s so soothing in a nervous world.
I had had a classical education prior to that.
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.
I grew up with a lot of classical music around.
I love singing jazz. I don’t like the idea that classical music should be over here and jazz should be someplace else. It’s all wonderful, and we should be open to enjoying it all.
When I wrote ‘High Stakes,’ I followed the classical format. I wrote an outline first, then a first draft, then got feedback and rewrote and rewrote it. I’d never done that before.
I don’t run after money or fame. The only thing I have always wished is to be a classical singer.
Suddenly I’ve got an overwhelming desire to surround myself with the aura of classical and Romantic art.
I am a classical music lover – not necessarily the contemporary stuff, but the old stuff.
When I first became an actress, I expected to do regional and classical theater; I just love the whole creative process.
I’ve played classical violin since I was 5 years old.
I went to a music academy in Los Angeles, and some friends started playing me Ravel and Prokofiev, who I liked, but what really blew me away was ‘The Rite of Spring.’ That’s what made me get interested in classical music for real and want to study it.
When you look at Istanbul, from Byzantium to the present day, it’s striking how it has always been a city of the people, with a political voice, right from its early classical history.
Russians are very discerning about ballet. They’re very opinionated about what classical ballet is.
There should be no boundaries in your relationship with sound. Often it’s not about the music itself but the context in which you hear the music. For instance, listening to a piece of classical music in a film you love often changes your perception of it entirely.
Growing up, there was only classical music on BBC Radio. We had to listen to the American Forces Network in Germany, which played pop songs, or the pirate radio boats off the coast.
I was pretty much a goody-two shoes at school – a bit boring, didn’t get in trouble with teachers – it was classical Yorkshire: a lot of respect to your elders. Once I started playing cricket that sort of slipped away.
So writing a song is much harder than doing a classical piece for me, because in a classical piece, I can just let the mood dictate what’s going to happen.
I started classical piano when I was eight, but I wasn’t a virtuoso. I just really liked it.
I have been trained for three years in Hindustani classical music. I keep humming and many Bollywood co-stars have been victimized by my relentless singing.
In western classical music with an orchestra, you focus the orchestra on melodies and harmony. In African music, the biggest focus is on rhythms and counter-rhythms – the complexity of rhythms.
Classical music presents some of the world’s most challenging pieces.
Soon afterwards I studied the inversion of sugar in the light of these considerations and immediately found that this classical reaction, too, was determined quantitatively by the same property of the acids, as was of course to be expected from the previous results.
I love… different kinds of music. I like classical music and pop music. I like alternative, and I like rap, hip-hop, and I kind of collected all these things that I love, and they infused my sensibilities, and I just wanted to sing because it felt like it needed to come out of me.
If we got into a time machine and went back to the 1700s, classical and baroque music would have been the equivalent of Beyonce and Jay-Z.
I was completely naive about the business of being an actor. My family didn’t go to the theater or to the movies. We watched television like every 1960s small-town American family, and I certainly never thought about being on TV. I thought I was going to be a classical actor in the grand tradition.
The terms ‘progressive’ and ‘liberal’ have virtually nothing to do with each other anymore. And if you are a classical liberal, you certainly aren’t a leftist.
I do not think classical music faces any threat because new music is being made through computer, as the real charm of classical is its purity, and one who is seeking purity will surely find classical music in spite of so many alternatives.
People wanted to do science outside of classical institutions like universities or big corporations, so we embraced it.
There’s been a time where I was like, I wanna be a folk singer; no, I wanna sing soul. I want to sing classical music. I want to sing R&B. I want to be on Broadway. I just wanna sing. Whatever comes out of my mouth, that’s what I want to do.
I don’t believe that classical architecture is enough to engage people anymore. They say: ‘So what else is new?’
As a kid, I loved classical music. Composers like Beethoven were like rock stars to me. Then there were the real rock stars: The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, and Bob Dylan.
I play piano and trumpet. I studied classical guitar.
Jazz isn’t dead yet. It’s the underpinning of everything in this country. Whether it’s a Broadway show, or fusion, or right on through classical music, if it’s coming out of the U.S., it’s not going to survive unless it’s got some jazz influence.
Ilaignan,’ the script of which has been penned by Chief Minister M Karunanidhi, is a period film that is set in the romantic era of classical music. You will find Western classical music mixed with our Indian melodies.
I am not aware of any sensible theory of how classical gravity could interact with quantum matter, and I can’t imagine how such a theory might work.
I think it’s useful to experience other types of dance and other cultures, and the life of a classical dancer these days is certainly not all tutus! So experience of other dance forms is a good idea.
Classical music has become rarefied, like a maiden aunt that nobody wants to talk to.
Firstly, I think the values that underpin all liberals, frankly – classical liberals, all liberals – of respect for the individual and freedom are worth fighting for.
My mother did play classical piano, not that well. And actually, my father sang with the big bands – he sang with Bob Crosby’s band – but he had to give up show business when his father died. He had to come back to Montgomery and take over the furniture store.
Maybe I’m genetically more inclined to music – but the music I make is so far removed from Indian classical music. I grew up in Texas!
I’m actually doing what I like doing, which is mixing opera music and classical music with soul and folk. And I was writing and talking about what I’ve actually experienced, and I don’t think that’s very common.
I have a fairly good collection of paintings, both classical and contemporary.
I took a lot of long summer road trips with my dad, and the mix of music we listened to on the road skipped around from classical to Western to new age to hyper-cinematic.
I think that’s one of the things that has always put me in kind of an odd niche. It’s that all of my understanding of orchestral music is via film, not via classical music like it’s supposed to be. To me it’s the same, it doesn’t make any difference.
Lately I’ve been listening to some classical music again, some jazz.
We were really interested in music from all over the world. We realized that what we were doing was very close to contemporary classical music because of the lack of tonality in the guitar- the fact that I play guitar the way I play.
I was lucky enough to grow up in a house where we listened to all kinds of music. We listened to Haitian, hip hop, soul, classical jazz, gospel and Cuban music, to name a few. When you have access to that as a child, it just opens up your world.
When I’m in the classical world, I really treat it as exactly classical and I don’t try and spruce it up or jazz it up or make it easier for the masses.
I also like Western classical music and jazz.
There was a period when I’d just come out of college where I’d been playing classical guitar and I suddenly realised that it wasn’t what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
Western classical music is participative. Look at the number of people who are involved in a symphony.
The best gift I was ever given was the arts. My mum gave me those on a silver platter. Growing up, her and my grandmother would take me to ballets, classical concerts, even smoky jazz clubs I wasn’t supposed to be in!
It’s a small community, the classical music community, along with the excitement of new places and new things and this feeling of being at home wherever you go because that’s where your community is.
Indian classical music was born when time barely existed. It developed further within the structures of royal courts and a system of patronage where the ruler or the feudal master determined all.
I’m primarily thought of as a rocker, and certainly ‘Frankenstein’ had a very dramatic power rock image. It was almost a precursor of heavy metal and fusion. But I also love jazz and classical and if there’s one common thread that runs through all my music, it is blues.
