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WE COULDN’T HAVE SAID IT BETTER OURSELVES...
“I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.
--Woody Allen
“An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.
--Dan Rather
“Opera is when a guy gets stabbed in the back and, instead of bleeding, he sings.
--Ed Gardner
"Assassins!"
--Arturo Toscanini to his orchestra
“Master, I worship you.”
--Anton Bruckner to Richard Wagner
“My music is best understood by children and animals.
--Igor Stravinsky
“Music is the only language in which you cannot say a mean or sarcastic thing.
--John Erskine
"All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff."
--Frank Zappa
"The bassoon is one of my favorite instruments. It has the medieval aroma, like the days when everything used to sound like that. Some people crave baseball . . . I find this unfathomable, but I can easily understand why a person could get excited about playing the bassoon."
--Frank Zappa
"I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I've felt it."
--Igor Stravinsky
"If it sounds good, it is good."
--Duke Ellington
“Why is it that whenever I hear a piece of music I don't like, it's always by Villa-Lobos?"
--Igor Stravinsky
“I still play jazz, and I've always got that trumpet very handy, but I'm coming to feel the classical venues are where my main focus is, in the realm of symphonic pops.”
--Doc Severinsen
“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.”
--Nina Simone
“There was a period when I'd just come out of college where I'd been playing classical guitar and I suddenly realized that it wasn't what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.”
--Andy Summers
“Then ultimately I was in a band called The Police by which time I played a lot of classical guitar, studied classic music, played jazz, rock.”
--Andy Summers
“Pee-wee Herman just kind of came out one day. I had a lot of training, I had done rap, classical, Shakespeare. I was in four or five different acting programs in different schools. I joined this improv group, and we did a lot of different character work, writing and improv. And just one day it... came out.”
--Paul Reubens
“If a jazz player is really playing, the classical player will have to respect him.”
--Wes Montgomery
“Jazz attracted me because in it I found a formal perfection and instrumental precision that I admire in classical music, but which popular music doesn't have.”
--Django Reinhardt
“I became a big "Stravinsky-oholic" and became involved in listening to classical music. Mozart and Beethoven, no. Schumann, no. Stravinsky, yes. Ravel, yes. Benjamin Britten, yes. Paul Hindemith, yes. These are my idols, even today, in classical music.”
--J. J. Johnson
”I used to go to these classical music shows at the Masonic Temple in Detroit, and see all these string players. I don't understand why they don't continue to do that for kids, teach them music appreciation.”
--Brian Holland part of the songwriting team Holland – Dozier - Holland that was responsible for much of the Motown Sound.
“Obviously classical music tends to be stuff that is usually at least a hundred years old.”
--Steve Hackett
“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
--Friedrich Nietzsche
“I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to.”
--Elvis Presley
“Never look at the trombones. You'll only encourage them.”
--Richard Strauss, on conducting
“Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.”
--Igor Stravinsky
"Music embodies feeling without forcing it to contend and combine with thought, as it is forced in most arts and especially in the art of words. If music has one advantage over the other media through which a person can represent the impressions of the soul, it owes this to its supreme capacity to make each inner impulse audible without the assistance of reason... Music presents at once the intensity and the expression of feeling. It is the embodied and intelligible essence of feeling, capable of being apprehended by our senses. It permeates them like a dart, like a ray, like a mist, like a spirit, and fills our soul."
--Franz Liszt
A Brief History of the (Classical) World
The Boys’ Club
Classical Speak
“Adagio”a guide to classical terms
Classical Starter Kit
Beethoven and beyond... but not too far
Classical 24/7
What Are They Doing Up There?
Now That I’m Here...
Concert etiquette for the rest of us
The Recycled Riff
Rock folks aren’t just lifting from each other
We Couldn’t Have Said It Better
Quotable quotes from all walks