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Quotes by Famous Musicians
"I write [music] as a sow piddles." -Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
"My sole inspiration is a telephone call from a producer." -Cole Porter
"Don't bother to look, I've composed all this already." -Gustav Mahler, to
Bruno Walter, who had stopped to admire mountain scenery in rural
Austria.
"I would rather play 'Chiquita Banana' and have my swimming pool than play
Bach and starve." -Xavier Cugat
"[Musicians] talk of nothing but money and jobs. Give me businessmen every
time. They really are interested in music and art." -Jean Sibelius,
explaining why he rarely invited musicians to his home.
"The amount of money one needs is terrifying ..." -Ludwig van Beethoven
"Only become a musician if there is absolutely no other way you can make a
living." -Kirke Mecham, on his life as a
composer
"I am not handsome, but when women hear me play, they come crawling to my
feet." -Niccolo Paganini
"Of course I'm ambitious. What's wrong with that? Otherwise you sleep all
day." -Ringo Starr
"Flint must be an extremely wealthy town: I see that each of you bought
two or three seats." -Victor Borge, playing to a
half-filled house in Flint, Mich.
"If one hears bad music it is one's duty to drown it by one's
conversation." -Oscar Wilde
"Critics can't even make music by rubbing their back legs together."
-Mel
Brooks
"Life can't be all bad when for 10 dollars you can buy all the Beethoven
sonatas and listen to them for 10 years." -William F. Buckley Jr.
"You can't possibly hear the last movement of Beethoven's Seventh and go
slow." -Oscar Levant, explaining his way out of a speeding ticket.
"Wagner's music is better than it sounds." -Mark Twain
"I love Beethoven, especially the poems." -Ringo Starr
"If a young man at the age of 23 can write a symphony like that, in five
years he will be ready to commit murder." -Walter Damrosch on Aaron
Copland
"There are still so many beautiful things to be said in C major." -Sergei
Prokofiev
"I never use a score when conducting my orchestra. Does a lion tamer enter
a cage with a book on how to tame a lion?" -Dimitri
Mitropolous
"God tells me how the music should sound, but you stand in the way."
-Arturo
Toscanini to a trumpet player
"Already too loud!" -Bruno Walter at his first rehearsal with an American
orchestra, on seeing the players reaching for their instruments.
"I really don't know whether any place contains more pianists than Paris,
or whether you can find more asses and virtuosos
anywhere." -Frederic Chopin
"When she started to play, Steinway himself came down personally and
rubbed his name off the piano." -Bob Hope, on
comedienne Phyllis Diller
"Never look at the trombones, it only encourages them." -Richard Strauss
"In opera, there is always too much singing." -Claude Debussy
"Oh how wonderful, really wonderful, opera would be if there were no
singers!" -Gioacchino Rossini
"Movie music is noise. It's even more painful than my sciatica." -Sir
Thomas Beecham
"I think popular music in this country is one of the few things in the
20th century that have made giant strides in
reverse." -Bing Crosby
"Theirs [the Beatles'] is a happy, cocky, belligerently resourceless brand
of harmonic primitivism... In the Liverpudlian repertoire, the
indulged amateurishness of the musical material,
though closely rivaled by the indifference of
the performing style, is actually surpassed only by the
ineptitude of the studio production method. 'Strawberry Fields'
suggests a chance encounter at a mountain
wedding between Claudio Monteverdi and a jug
band." -Glenn Gould
"It's pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind
of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain
old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness." -Jerry
Garcia |
