Sheldon Harnick Quotes

There are millions and billions of atoms of memory of all kinds of musical themes in me.

Music is essentially built upon primitive memory structures.

I love symphonies. I love string sections.

Learning a play is one thing, but to learn to play Vivaldi's 'Four Seasons' without music: that's brilliant.

The guitar was not treated very seriously as a concert recital instrument.

I just think it's good to have a big, living, breathing piece of music that's not just songs.

First, I started to play the organ. I did that until I was 11. From the age of 11 to 13, I gave up music entirely. And then at 13, I picked up the guitar, and after one and a half years, I started practicing intensively. I began playing in rock bands, and it was there that I discovered that the music I liked to write was always instrumental.

The thing I realised about composition is, we remember most composers for four bars of music. Four singable bars of music. Pretty much any major composer from Debussy to Ravel to Mozart to whoever else - you can kind of hum it.

The thing I love about music... you can close your eyes and be transported back to a memory or a dream or a feeling.

No matter what I do, I've always recognized that Deep Purple is primarily an instrumental band. That's where all the music comes from in rehearsals - it all stems from the music.

Everyone thought my first album would be instrumental, but I didn't want to do it - it took me eight months to make.

I chose 'Time' by Hans Zimmer because it's very melodic, and the way it progresses throughout the track is very unique. I am personally a very big fan of piano melodies, and to me, 'Time' is just perfect.

I can sing in my head and rearrange the tune of a song, note per note. I am a nerd.

I really feel like I've written my most effective music in the instrumental realms.

I would sit at the organ and just start making up things by myself - I was maybe 7 years old, which was too young to even know how to notate music. So I never wrote anything down, but when I'd make things up, I'd memorize them.

My first album, 'Englaborn,' was based on music originally written for the theatre. My solo albums, like 'IBM 1401, a User's Manual' and 'Fordlandia,' have also had narratives attached to them.

I consider myself more of a rock 'n' roll fiddler.

For years, my favorite composers had been Monteverdi and Bach. Then I began to rediscover the 19th century, see it from another perspective.

I had no interest or intention of ever writing music. I was a professional violinist in my 20s. I was obsessed with conducting, and I was conducting as much as I could, and I was studying as much as I could. I went to USC; I got an undergrad degree in violin and a master's degree in conducting.

When I was going to high school, in the high school band we would play these kind of hour-long concerts for our parents. All the parents would come to the gymnasium, and the band would play an hour-long kind of orchestra piece. 'Synchestra' is supposed to be similar, like a high school band orchestra piece.

My grandmother got me recordings of the 'Goldberg Variations,' in addition to the 'Brandenburg Concertos,' the Mozart string quartets and Beethoven's 'Seventh Symphony.'

The state-of-the-art techniques really allowed us to make maps of how Sting's brain organizes music. That's important because at the heart of great musicianship is the ability to manipulate in one's mind rich representation of the desired soundscape.

Studying music involves a lot of mathematics and a lot of exercises of memory. Or you've got to be able to be like somebody, to play like somebody, to play Mozart's music the way he played it and how he intended it. You've got to make it perfect, and that's not what I want to do. Although it is beautiful.

There were a few singers at home, one or two aunties. We did have a piano but I think that got put on the fire eventually.

Writing music - particularly music without lyrics - calls almost exclusively on the subconscious.