Johannes Brahms Quotes

A Beethoven symphony should be rehearsed like chamber music, only for a lot more people.

I love doing concert music.

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 love classical music and often listen to symphonies or opera in the morning.

I wouldn't want to hear Beethoven without beautiful bass, the cellos, the tuba. It's very important. Hip-hop has thunderous bass. And so does Beethoven. If you don't have the bass, it's like being amputated. It's like you have no legs.

Western classical music is participative. Look at the number of people who are involved in a symphony.

I grew up loving symphonies. Beethoven is beautiful.

My whole life, I've been watching conductors. I was 7 the first time I played with a conductor. Seeing the ones that do it well, it's an amazing thing.

I feel at home in an orchestral score.

In contrast, traditional classical music starts from an abstract musical schema. This is then notated and only expressed in concrete sound as a last stage, when it is performed.

I know that John Adams has had a very hard time directing French ensembles.

I don't see how they can with most of my pieces, but I think it's unfortunate that they can through familiarity with flashy performances of a great deal of other music.

There was one thing Beethoven didn't do. When one of his string quartets was played, you can believe the second violin wasn't improvising.

From a very early period of my life I have derived the highest enjoyment from listening to music, especially to melody, which is to me the most pleasing form of composition.

Composers love to write for symphony orchestras because the symphony is the Rolls Royce of musical instruments.

I think recordings have been a terrific advance because now, when you have a piece of music, particularly something that appears to the listener very complicated, there's really a push to the world to try to figure out what it was that he was hearing.

I don't listen to much modern composition.

I love music, especially classical like Verdi; it's a great way to relax.

After conducting Wagner, Beethoven's triple concerto is like taking an Alka Seltzer.

There's the Bacon society, which is fostered by his fourth wife Helen Bacon, but I don't know what kind of performances his music gets. He wrote symphonic music and some chorale music.

The further the music develops, the more complex the apparatus used by the composer to express his thoughts becomes.

My show business career doesn't mean I can't write a symphony. It just means I was never asked to write one.

Even in classical music, the cello doesn't get a lot of respect because the piano and the violin get it all.

We've been performing with symphonies all of our career and it sounds so wonderful when they play 'My Girl' with the large string section, I want to turn around and look.

Musical composition, about which I know little, is a complicated art, and some contemporary music may be the equivalent of a complex abstract painting.