Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You should diligently play scales and fingerpractices. There are many, however, who believe they'll achieve all, by practicing daily on technique for hours on end, up till high age. It's like practicing every day to enumerate the alfabet faster and faster. One would think one could make better use of their valuable time.
What love is to man, music is to the arts and to mankind. Music is love itself, -- it is the purest, most ethereal language of passion, showing in a thousand ways all possible changes of colour and feeling; and though true in only a single instance, it yet can be understood by thousands of men -- who all feel differently.
I had already been a young singer. And once, as a profession, I was a young singer, what you would call a soprano in England, but I was an alto in singing Jewish music in bar mitzvahs and weddings and synagogues throughout New York City because, after Israel, New York is probably the biggest Jewish community in the world.
Yet it was impossible for me to say to people, 'Speak louder, shout, for I am deaf.' Ah, how could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than others, a sense which I once possessed in the highest perfection, a perfection such as few in my profession enjoy or ever have enjoyed.
As little boys, my brother and I used to spend hours with my grandmother, asking her about the details of how she came to America. She could only give us a smattering of details, but they all found their way into our collective imagination, eventually becoming a part of our own cultural identity and connection to the past.
When you travel from your own country to another country for a long period, you do become aware of the differences. For example, verbal expression is much more important in France - in Finland people don't speak so much. Also, Finnish people say things directly; that kind of direct honesty would be very impolite in France.
The virtuoso element in jazz playing, all those very fast runs in the upper extremes, simply doesn't appeal to me. That's why I don't want to make my concerto "virtuosic" in the sense of a technical show-off. I want a beautiful sound and a melodic and lyrical line. I am more interested in the way someone can play musically.
The value of streaming platforms is estimated at a few billion dollars, and creators can only afford a pizza without pepperoni at the end of the year with the revenues. Without musicians, all those platforms wouldn't exist, so we urgently need an appropriate and sustainable business model for musicians for the 21st century.
His wry sense of humour and his stalwart courage were an inspiring example to so many. His ability to laugh at Life's idiosyncrasies and himself in a self deprecating way taught that most valuable of lessons: 'to be of good cheer, no matter what Life threw at you, and ever to find the hope that dwells in every human heart'.
United have spent all season commemorating the 50th anniversary of Busby's decision to defy the Football League and take the club on a tragic and triumphant journey into Europe, but no orchestrated event could conjure the celebrations ignited by last night's outstanding obliteration of Roma or deliver a more fitting tribute.
I think the reason being Ravi Shankar's daughter is not such a pressure to me is that I don't look at myself in that way. Of course, he's the best-known Indian musician there is so, people naturally look to me as the next one, but the truth is there are many other musicians out there as well as other students of my father's.
I collaborated with a brilliant young sound designer named Anthony Mattana, who enriched the sound of the total production with vocal effects, percussive and other sounds. He also mixed the sound effects and the music, using the theater's first rate sound system to complement the theater's acoustics. This completed my score.
There's a lot of guys who have great technique, people practicing a lot and you hear them, but there's not that many people who when you hear them, you go, "Man, that guy must practice a lot," right? Then you hear Miles Davis play, and you go, "Man, I had a girlfriend like that." That's a whole another level of musicianship.
I try to influence this improvisation in two ways. One is by centering on reflections, in both senses of the word: acoustic reflections as well as visual reflections from a mirror or surface, and then reflecting on the material in a contemplative way. The other influence is listening to the tails of the sounds that you make.
In business, in the music world, people know that I can be very friendly and warm but that, after a certain moment, the business is closed. I like to be alone: in order to concentrate on my work, the social life does not exist. It has never existed for me, really. I have chosen instead the working life because I prefer that.
There is no theory. You have only to listen. Pleasure is the law. I love music passionately. And because l love it, I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it. It is a free art gushing forth, an open-air art boundless as the elements, the wind, the sky, the sea. It must never be shut in and become an academic art.
In my years of working in theatre and TV I've learnt that my main skill is not the instrumental playing but the idea of what to play and my interest for so many kinds of music. Often people ask me to contribute to projects when they don't stay in just one genre. I feel more like a composer who just has to play his own things.
In the late '70s I was asked to sing for the first time in Germany. I'll never forget it. It was at a festival in Bremen. The German audience went berserk and the reviews were a phenomenon. For some reason the German audience understood how technically challenging this music was; it wasn't just someone yelling their head off.
Kipling said that Success and Failure are both imposters, and we should all listen to Kipling, if only because none of us are likely to know anybody else named Rudyard. But having been bitten in my life by the jaws of both victory and defeat, I must rush to add that success is to failure as butter pecan ice cream is to death.
The more dollars the studio producers put in, the less freedom we have. If the budget hits $100m, they get scared - they'll take the existing score of a successful movie and expect composers to copy it, like wallpaper. The biggest challenge for any composer in Hollywood is to be as creative as possible within those boundaries.
Let me show you how to drive me crazy,Let me show you how to make me feel so good,Let me show you how to take me to the edge of the stars and back again.You've gotta show me how to drive you crazy,You've gotta show me all the things you wanna happen to you,We've gotta tell each other everything, we always wanted someone to do.
I understand that in people's eyes, classical music is kind of a lost and dying art, but in my eyes, it's like, "Oh, the musical language, which has been, in the past, only available to a scarce few at the top of the tower, is now wide open." Now people's ears are becoming more amenable to fake strings - I think this is great!
Our behaviour as an athlete is often determined by our previous experiences and how we dealt with those experiences. It is these experiences from past performances that can often shape what will happen in the future. It is for this reason that you learn and move on to be more mentally stronger as both an athlete and as a human!
I was born in 1928, so in 1943, 1944, we had the war in Rome. There were a lot of hardships, a lack of food, many shortages. So when I worked with the Americans, the English, and the Canadians soon after the war, when I played with them, they paid me with food. That will give you an idea how widespread poverty was at that time.
I'm not a culture snob. So while, of course, I think the Mozart 'Requiem' or, say, Beethoven's 'Ninth' are some of the greatest works of art in the history of humankind, that's not to say the Beatles or Queen or Simon and Garfunkel aren't brilliant, beautiful, important works of art that should be sung without a sense of irony.
It wasn't until I got out of the Army and I heard Coltrane's record 'Coltrane,' when he was doing 'Inch Worm' and 'Out of This World,' that I thought, 'Oh my God, you can do that?' And then I thought, 'OK, I better go back and listen to Eric Dolphy a bit.' And then I said, 'Hmm, I better pull out these Ornette Coleman records.'
My great grandfather used to say to his wife, my great-grandmother, who in turn told her daughter, my grandmother, who repeated it to her daughter, my mother, who used to remind her daughter, my own sister, that to talk well and eloquently was a very great art, but that an equally great one was to know the right moment to stop.
My first synthesizer was the VCS3. I got it in Bristol in the late Sixties, long before Pink Floyd used them. I had to sell an acoustic guitar and an old reel-to-reel tape recorder to raise the money. You can do fantastic things with modern computers, but you cannot use them in the same intuitive, spontaneous way you can a VCS3.
I believe in people. I feel, love, need and respect people above all else, including natural scenery, organized piety and nationalistic superstructures. One human figure on the slope of a mountain can make the mountain disappear for me, one person fighting for truth can disqualify for me the entire system which had dispensed it.
Writing for film is so different; it's such an act of submission, both on a monetary and time level, because you basically kind of have to just set everything else aside - it's like suddenly getting a temp job that requires you to work 16-hour days. Also just aesthetically, you have to completely leave all of your ego out of it.
Laugh, love, dream, strive, smile, feel, joy, look, try, fail, read, walk, search, share, help, work, fun, learn, retry, sweat, cry, rest, wait, fear, hope, trust, pride... when we have lived all of these, our photography might stop being a record of what our camera sees and become an expression of what we as photographers feel.
When I travel with my kids abroad, I am not myself, but I'm more a father who wants to protect them. Sometimes, I am even aggressive about certain things and get surprised seeing myself like that: for instance, when people want to take pictures of them. I am fine if they want to take my pictures, but they are not public property.
When I was a teenager in a band playing, everything was great. I still don't feel any different. I still wake up with the same love and passion as when I did this with the band. Because my life in music has let me live the kind of life that I've loved, and I've been able to share it with others and take care of the people I love.
It's hard to pick. I mean, I think the one that is most emblematic of the collaboration that occurred is "We Know The Way." That's the first song we wrote for the movie [Moana]. We actually got it written that weekend in New Zealand, so we're all in New Zealand, we're all absorbing this culture, and Opetaia [Foa'i] brought it in.
If you ask me, the place that a story happens is as equal character. It's almost like an ecological viewpoint: These people are living in this piece of land, and in this piece of land in this time this is possible. For me, I almost think location first. It's time first - what year is it - then where are we, and then who is in it.
When the theater is gothic it matches the sensibility of the show. It's also very intimate. The audience is very close to the performers. The show is scary and the scary stuff always works best with an intimacy with the audience. And the show is erotic, and I think erotic always works best when it's close to the audience, as well.
I have come from France more firmly convinced than ever that Negros should write Negro music. We have our own racial feeling and if we try to copy whites we will make bad copies…We won France by playing music which was ours and not a pale imitation of others, and if we are to develop in America we must develop along our own lines.
It cannot remain unmentioned that so many poorly equipped boys, and boys who have no talent at all for music, have been accepted into the school to date that the quality of music has necessarily declined and deteriorated. And those who do bring a few precepts with them when they come to school are not ready to be used immediately.
From the glow of enthusiasm I let the melody escape. I pursue it. Breathless I catch up with it. It flies again, it disappears, it plunges into a chaos of diverse emotions. I catch it again, I seize it, I embrace it with delight... I multiply it by modulations, and at last I triumph in the first theme. There is the whole symphony.
But what a humiliation for me when someone standing next to me heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone standing next to me heard a shepherd singing and again I heard nothing. Such incidents drove me almost to despair; a little more of that and I would have ended my life - it was only my art that held me back.
Since I worked with Danny Boyle before on Slumdog Millionaire, we have great success and everything. So, when I first got the script and the screenplay of Simon (Beaufoy) and I was reading it, even before the shoot, some kind of sounds came into my mind and I put some stuff [down] and sent it to Danny when he was cutting the movie.
With vocal and choral music, first and foremost, it's the text. Not only do I need to serve the text, but the text - when I'm doing it right - acts as the perfect 'blueprint', and all the architecture is there. The poet has done the heavy lifting, so my job is to find the soul of the poem and then somehow translate that into music.
Congregational singing is a holy act, and as I organize my thoughts, I hear my old pastor, Alistair Begg, reminding me that in our song worship, we have to be spiritually alive (dead people don't sing), spiritually assisted (through the enabling of the Holy Spirit), and spiritually active (committed to daily walking with the Lord).
When I got the call about 'Arrival,' I was doubtful because the piece had had a life on cinema already, and we were getting to the point where the original context was sort of lost, and I didn't want that to happen. On the other hand, 'Arrival' itself is a political film because it's about unification and getting beyond boundaries.
In music everything is prolonged, everything is edified, and when the enchantment has ceased, we are still bathed in its clarity; solitude is accompanied by a new hope between pity for ourselves - which makes us more indulgent and more understanding - and the certitude of finding something again, that which lives for ever in music.
For I assure you, without travel, at least for people from the arts and sciences, one is a miserable creature!... A man of mediocre talents always remains mediocre, may he travel or not - but a man of superior talents, which I cannot deny myself to have without being blasphemous, becomes - bad, if he always stays in the same place.
I am a being of Heaven and Earth,of thunder and lightning, of rain and wind, of the galaxies, of the suns and the stars and the void through which they travel. The essence of nature, eternal, divine that all men seek to know to hear, known as the great illusion time, and the all-prevailing atmosphere. And now you know my background.
Films are tricky because for years you're getting told you're about to make it and you're about to be busy for four or six months or you're about to be on tour for press. But these things tend not to happen, and meanwhile you've said 'no' to many things 'cause you thought you were going to be busy, for years, for years this happens.
Music needs the juxtaposition of opposites to achieve its drama, so harshness and dissonance are simply part of the material a musician can use to create a musical work. All one thing is a bore - all dissonance, or all fatuous consonance. George Winston and Guns and Roses are two sides of the same worthless coin in my esthetic world.
I think the hardest part is figuring out what to say no to because the whole start of your career is just begging anybody to let you perform or to contribute music to something. Then it's like turning on a faucet because the moment it's on, people are like, "Oh, you can do stuff? All right. Well, you want to do it every single thing?