Best 85 quotes in «classical music quotes» category

Our audience, it has been a more difficult process for classical music audiences around the world, and I'm not completely certain why.

The death of classical music is perhaps its oldest continuing tradition.

The history of music is nothing more than the history of art-music or classical music, the music that was commissioned by aristocrats.

The classical music is soothing and stimulating, good for thinking.

The classical music world is so snobbish.

To sing is to pray twice.

The peculiar characteristic of classical music is that it is really better than it sounds.

There are three virtuous styles of music; classical, jazz and heavy metal. I do love classical music but I don't listen to it much anymore and I never listen to metal, so I am not very interested in music that is difficult to play.

What I do for migraines when I get them, I listen to classical music, and I turn it up really loud.

What is best in music is not to be found in the notes.

There's a certain standard in classical music that allows the application of the term "genius," but you're treading on thin ice if you start applying it to rock & rollers.

What is classical music if not the epitome of sensuality, passion, and understated erotica that popular music, even with all of its energy and life, cannot even begin to touch?

When I was very young, I played in a punk-rock band, but I also studied music theory and classical music.

What I wanted to do was music, until I was about 16. But it was jazz and rock, never classical music.

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

Be the person your pet rat thinks you are!

Concert pianists get to be quite chummy with dead composers. They can't help it. Classical music isn't just music. It's a personal diary. An uncensored confession in the dead of night. A baring of the soul. Take a modern example. Florence and the Machine? In the song 'Cosmic Love,' she catalogs the way in which the world has gone dark, distorting her, when she, a rather intense young woman, was left bereft by a love affair. 'The stars, the moon, they have all been blown out.

History's greatest composers world be rolling in their graves if they knew that their beautiful compositions were reduced to distorted hold music.

Humanity thrown together in the equivalent of a Petri dish under a microscope bred malignant organisms as often as benign.

I am into classical music, in fact,” I say. “It’s been around for more than a thousand years, its composers have more name recognition than whatever ‘indie’ music you’re listening to right now, and symphonies sell out millions of performances a year. So go ahead, tell me classical music is tedious or boring or inferior.

Whenever I visit a city, I like to see what classical music concerts are on offer.

Works of art make rules but rules do not make works of art.

Art doesn’t give rise to anything in us that isn’t already there. It simply stirs our curious consciousness and sparks a fire that illuminates who we have always wanted to be.

In a timepiece, a sweep of a second hand is so slim in a way that it doesn't wait for no man, and that's why we choose to conceive things from the heart.

He wore his personality like a suit that was too tight.

In the background, classical music plays from a paint-splattered radio, the New York station with the ancient announcer more frequently heard in doctors’ waiting rooms and other places where signs prohibit the use of cell phones – the last bastions of Beethoven or Chopin or, on racier days, Shostakovich.

Listening to classical music is like reading philosophy books, not everybody has to do it. Music is not for everybody.

I shall never be converted, and I shall remain true to my old religion of the classics until my life's end.

Injustice, large and small, was like sour, moldy bread. Consumed often enough, it brought on hunger for the meat of revenge.

One imagines that he might have understood the supreme value of Bach's vocal works - not primarily as objects or artefacts, but as individual visions of life and as priceless forms of communication with his fellow man. For this is what is so distinctive when we compare Bach's legacy to that of his forerunners and successors. Monteverdi gives us the full gamut of human passions in music, the first composer to do so; Beethoven tells us what a terrible struggle it is to transcend human frailties and to aspire to the Godhead; and Mozart shows the kind of music we might hope to hear in heaven. But it is Bach, making music in the Castle of Heaven, who gives us the voice of God - in human form.

Now that rock is turning 50, it's become classical itself. It's interesting to see that development.

Rachmaninoff. The 18th Variation of a Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.

Regardless of the age of the people in the audience, they are clapping, screaming with joy and enjoying each and every note. I used to think classical music was boring. But that was because I never really gave it a chance. When I first saw 2CELLOS' cover of Smooth Criminal, I was mesmerized by their talent and instantly intrigued. With just two instruments, they created a sound so powerful and incredible, a sound I had never known could come from a cello.

Robert Kapilow is a born teacher, an enthusiast who can think on his feet, a 110 percent believer in the project at hand ... It’s a cheering thought that this kind of missionary enterprise did not pass from this earth with Leonard Bernstein. Robert Kapilow is awfully good at what he does. We need him.

Sometimes in the great soundtrack of our lives there are no words, there are only emotions; I believe this is why God gave us classical music.

Sometimes, when inspiration runs dry, I drink classical music until my words spill out.

Modern man is full of platitudes about living life to its fullest, with catchy keychain phrases and little plaques for kitchen walls. But if you've never retreated to the solitude of a dark room and listened to Beethoven's Ninth from start to finish, you know nothing. For music is a transcendental exploration of human emotion and experience, the very fabric of life in its purest form. And the Ninth our greatest musical achievement.

The classics constitute an almost infallible process for awakening the soul to its full stature. In coming to know a classic, one has made a friend for life. It can be recalled to the mind and 'read' all over again in the imagination. And actually perusing the text anew provides a joy that increases with time. These marvelous works stand many rereadings without losing their force. In fact, they almost demand rereading, as a Beethoven symphony demands replaying. We never say of a music masterpiece, 'Oh I've heard that!' Instead, we hunger to hear it again to take in once more, with new feeling and insight, its long-familiar strains.

The power of classical music turns my words into fire.

There was that sound again--snap, then a footfall. She tried to whirl around as a dark form--Dear God--sprang with a splash from the darkness--grabbed her from behind, shoved her under the water.

Violinists wear the imprint on their necks with pride For they are the players of harmony. Pilgrims, too, wear the imprint on their foreheads with pride For they are the conductors of unity. And Lovers? Why, they are made humble by the imprint on their hearts For they are merely the instruments of rhapsody.

Whenever i find myself losing faith in humanity, i come back to the classical music. They are a great reminder that we are also able to produce beautiful things made out of strong and barely controllable emotions.

Whatever comes, I'll take the good--and send the rest to hell.

What is classical music if not the epitome of sensuality, passion and understated erotica that popular music, even with all its energy and life, cannot even begin to touch?

Would you think of somebody who you adore, who’s no longer there? A beloved grandmother, a lover — somebody in your life who you love with all your heart, but that person is no longer with you. Bring that person into your mind, and at the same time follow the line all the way from B to E, and you’ll hear everything that Chopin had to say.

A good deal of classical music is, today, the opium of the good citizen.

We are the conductors of the beauty of the orchestra of our inner lives. Keep a Händel on it and don't hold Bach!

A musicologist is a man who can read music but cannot hear it.

Being a classical musician I'm fascinated with how my colleagues, not just singers, but every musician finds ways to express something else or something new or the same ol', same ol' in classical music. I'm always in dialogue with other musicians at least orally, if I can't be with them and a lot of dead musicians as well. I've learned a lot from dead people on recordings.

Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky were not classical musicians while they were alive and active, they were the rock stars of their day.