Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
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.
I'm not saying that in order to be a great jazz musician you have to be a great classical pianist first. But I am saying that it makes things easier when you can get around the instrument, and you have some idea of how to approach the various hurdles.
Over the years, I was lucky; right from the beginning, I studied with a lady who had a lot of... she was a classical singer, and of course, they're a little bit more into, you know, preserving the voice, making sure your instrument is ready to perform.
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.
I'd like to play something classical. I'm in the Strindberg society, and we do readings of Strindberg plays. I'd love to do Nora in 'A Doll's House.' And Chekhov. I have been working back to back on what I call 'regular jobs,' so it's hard to do plays.
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.
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.
The first concert that my parents took me to was in this canyon in Saudi Arabia called Buttermilk Canyon. You sleep under the stars in the desert, and ex-pats - German, Swiss, Canadian, American - would play classical music that filled the whole canyon.
It's funny: when I was a kid, my mom would reorganize the record collection all the time. She'd have classical, she'd have Celtic, she'd have rock and roll, and then she'd have female singers. And I don't like it that female singers are their own genre.
I started classical and operatic lessons when I was 8 and become an operatic singer and went to competition. I write my own music. A lot of the songs, growing up, I was into writing dark stories and poems, and one day I started putting melodies to them.
My work participates in that really quick and easy and inexpensive material that's part of our culture. In that way, my work engages the means of production that we live with, even while it's classical and embodies some things from a very long time ago.
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 these confused times, the role of classical music is at the very core of the struggle to reassert cultural and ethical values that have always characterized our country and for which we have traditionally been honored and respected outside our shores.
New Age is a very small box. It was a term that was brought in by the music industry to classify music that is neither jazz, classical, pop or rock. They didn't know what to call it or what to do with it. So they threw it all together under this one name.
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.
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'm not a really good classical guitarist by any means, but what I learned from this is a way of working very slowly on solo pieces and I enjoyed working on these pieces of John's. They were not written for solo guitar but a lot of them were easy to adapt.
A love of classical music is only partially a natural response to hearing the works performed, it also must come about by a decision to listen carefully, to pay close attention, a decision inevitably motivated by the cultural and social prestige of the art.
There is a reactionary conservative side of classical music, which is not the most exciting side of it. The side that draws me in, there's a real encouragement of risk-taking, going back to masters of that tradition like Beethoven and Bartok and Stravinsky.
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'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.
One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.
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.
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.
Some of the young kids look for one hit to be a star; that what they're known for the rest of their life... I never wanted to be known as one thing; that is the reason I do classical theater, write, direct and the blessings God has given me... I want to share.
If someone is a straight jazzhead, or a straight metalhead, or straight classical, they have a very narrow range of what they allow into their lives. But the people who listen to what we put out into the world have to be open-minded. Because we're so pluralist.
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.
I've been lucky that I've performed with a lot of the classical people I've wanted to work with so I'd like to do something that people didn't see coming. Like Madonna, or being Welsh - the Tom Jones thing. Or somebody suggested N-Dubz - that would be brilliant!
After attending the gymnasium between my eighth and seventeenth years, I studied classical philology at Berlin University for two years under Boeckh and Lachmann, and with the friendly support of Emanuel Geibel and Franz Kugler, I dabbled in all sorts of poetry.
I started practicing yoga when I was a teenager, studying classical dance. My body and mind were very open but not very strong. I was trusting, excited, passionate, and receptive. All good qualities when balanced with the proper amount of strength and awareness.
My favorite song is called 'Reachout.' There are so many different stories told in that song. I think anyone who listens to it will gather a different meaning, but each answer is true. I also like the sound of it, period - there are a lot of classical influences.
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.
Music has always been in my family, but it was mainly keyboards. I learned to play classical piano, but when I first heard the amazing bass guitar of James Jamerson, who played on all the big Motown hits of the '60s and '70s, I knew bass guitar was my instrument.
For me as a writer, Albanian is simply an extraordinary means of expression - rich, malleable, adaptable. As I have said in my latest novel, 'Spiritus,' it has modalities that exist only in classical Greek, which puts one in touch with the mentality of antiquity.
Dancers, many dancers today can do so much technically. You can give them steps that are complicated, then more complicated, pyrotechnical - and they can execute these steps to perfection. But to do simple steps with a pure classical line, that is truly difficult.
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.
Few words in any language carry such a load of meaning as 'honor.' It is an old word, unchanged even in its spelling from classical Latin to modern English. Spoken or written, it does not seem to require much explanation; most people think they know what it means.
For 'The Grace of Kings,' I read Han Dynasty historical records in Classical Chinese, which allowed me to get a sense of the complexity of the politics and the 'surprisingly modern' reactions of the historical figures to recurrent problems of state administration.
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.
For decades, Big Oil ravaged our environment. They knew what they were peddling was lethal, but they didn't care. They used the classical Big Tobacco playbook of denial, denial, denial, and all the while, they did everything to hook society on their lethal product.
I think differently, I think it's about reaching everybody on every different plane and every different level, and if I could remix the song and do a dance remix, that's great. If I could do a classical version, that'll be great too. It's all just about expression.
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 was once asked by Jeremy Paxman what is it about celebrity and said that people these days seem to think a celebrity is someone who has escaped the constraints of ordinary people: that they don't have the same kind of problems, almost as if they're classical gods.
In the '20s and '30s, there were these musicals either set on college campuses or based on classical stories, so any of the Rodgers and Hart musicals certainly influenced me. I was definitely influenced by any of the 'Porgy' songs; I was influenced by 'American Pie.'
Classical scores go up and down; they're kind of hysterical in a way. And movie scores are much more - they just drive and move forward, and they build and can't go up and down at that same speed. It's a big job to turn that into something that pushes the movie along.
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.
If some independent artists are using film as a medium to reach out to an audience, it should be promoted. Cinema is a popular medium and has a broad reach. There have been films with ghazals, classical and folk songs sung by local artists, which gave them popularity.
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.
If history, philosophy and so on vanish from academic life, what they leave in their wake may be a technical training facility or corporate research institute. But it will not be a university in the classical sense of the term, and it would be deceptive to call it one.
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.