Dave Brubeck Quotes

Aeroplanes interested me, and at the outbreak of the Second World War, I joined the RAF as a volunteer reservist. I took the opportunity of studying the books which the RAF made available for radio mechanics and looked forward to an interesting course in radio.

The symphonies are the things that, as a soloist, I've not gotten to play. I used to travel the world playing concertos, and then I would sit and listen to the symphony.

The songs of Bizet are by a French peer of Rossini. When Rossini stopped composing, he was living in Paris. He also wrote some beautiful songs in French.

Classical music presents some of the world's most challenging pieces.

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.

Let us not forget that the European Community started as a project for peace after the terrible Second World War. And today people take for granted the freedom to travel, to study, to work abroad. And the citizens of one country have almost exactly the same rights as another country.

I approach everything as chamber music. Even with Beethoven symphonies, I lead from the violin and basically encourage the orchestra to think of it as a giant string quartet.

I started directing chamber orchestras, then adding bigger pieces, adding winds, adding small symphonies. I've always loved chamber music, and I've done a lot.

I remember hearing the song when I was 12 or 14 in - it must have been in Chicago, 'cause we didn't have a radio on the farm, and it was during the second World War. I had three brothers in that war who went overseas.

I like classical music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and I adore Bach above all.

In the Second World War, I was a little girl. I was evacuated in my country.

The man on the street, he knows who Beethoven is, he knows who Mozart is.

The orchestral or symphonic music never interested me.

Mozart has written opera, symphony, sacred and chamber music - not to mention his piano and violin concerti.

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

I think that of my 21 symphonies, each has its own place.

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

I actually collect old First and Second World War memorabilia.

I guess really what my goal is is just to enlarge the violin repertoire.

To my mind and ear, there is simply nothing that compares to the musical sophistication of a late Beethoven, Bartok, Schubert or Brahms work for minimal forces.

Most Beethoven symphonies require 80 or more instruments, and the late romantics even more.

I basically love classical music. I love a lot of musicians playing together and the whole culture of that, whether it's Indian or it's Western.

After the war, once the bop revolution had taken hold, there were all kinds of young musicians, talented young musicians, who were ready for this fusion of classical and jazz.

I felt frustrated by the limitations of rock and the lifestyle of touring around on a bus and playing the same songs over and over. So I went back to school to study music, and one of the things I got into was the Italian opera composer Puccini.

The one thing that I'm most proud of, during the Second World War, I worked on airplanes in a defense plant.