Quotes on Classical

I was trained in classical piano, but it kind of dawned on me that classical pianists compete for six job openings a year, and the rest of us get to play 'Blue Moon' in a hotel lobby.

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.

A romantic or classical view of the French approach would have been to say, 'It's a French company; let no one attack it. Let's block any merger. But the reality is Alcatel-Lucent is not a French company; it's a global company. Its main markets are China and the U.S. Its ownership is foreign; most of its managers aren't French.

Classical - perhaps I should say 'orchestral' - music is so digital, so cut up, rhythmically, pitchwise and in terms of the roles of the musicians. It's all in little boxes. The reason you get child prodigies in chess, arithmetic, and classical composition is that they are all worlds of discontinuous, parceled-up possibilities.

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.

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.

It was very interesting in my world, because I grew up as a fan and I did not know that there was a thing called R&B, pop, country, classical - I just knew that I loved music.

I wasn't a jazz player, but a classical musician, and I improvised arrangements of popular songs using classical motifs.

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.

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.

It is true that classical libertarian thought is opposed to state intervention in social life, as a consequence of deeper assumptions about the human need for liberty, diversity, and free association.

I think American Ballet Theatre is setting that standard now for classical ballet, that you can dream big, and it doesn't matter what you look like, where you come from, what your background is.

In the ballet studio, it was such an organized and disciplined environment, like I'd never had in my life. Seeing myself in the mirror, surrounded by the classical music, that's when I started to fall in love with dance.

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.

We need to bring music to the people, even to those who normally do not listen to classical music.

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.

Quantum mechanics broke the mold of the previous framework, classical mechanics, by establishing that the predictions of science are necessarily probabilistic.

Although cover notes for classical music albums tend to say that the trill of flutes suggests mountain streams and so on, I don't think anybody listens to music with the expectation that they're going to be presented with a sort of landscape painting.

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.

If you come from mathematics, as I do, you realize that there are many problems, even classical problems, which cannot be solved by computation alone.

For me, let's keep jazz as folk music. Let's not make jazz classical music. Let's keep it as street music, as people's everyday-life music. Let's see jazz musicians continue to use the materials, the tools, the spirit of the actual time that they're living in, as what they build their lives as musicians around.