Andre Previn Quotes

Charles Ives was writing radically innovative music, but nobody performed it, and nobody knew about it.

Mike Patton is a genius... It is definitely the hardest music I've ever played.

The music that I make, the younger musicians are referring to it as 'stretch' music.

Avant-garde music is sort of research music. You're glad someone's done it but you don't necessarily want to listen to it.

In art and music, particularly in the 20th century, there was a big period there where for something to be called profound you had to not be able to understand it.

We were really interested in music from all over the world. We realized that what we were doing was very close to contemporary classical music because of the lack of tonality in the guitar- the fact that I play guitar the way I play.

I think the thing I've always tried to do is - and I didn't plan it, it just started to come out that way - is try to make challenging music that flirts with accessibility.

I'm very eclectic in my music tastes - anything from Nina Simone to Beethoven to Talvin Singh.

I am a massive fan of early electronica like Steve Reich, Pat Metheny and Thomas Dolby. I used to be a big raver, too, so anything dance. I love ambient music like Tunng. I love acoustic and classical, too.

I probably went to musique concrete concerts - though not the very first ones - at the beginning of the 50s.

That's what I love about our music - it'll never be a hit because you can't dance to it.

Mars is really different, into art. Lydia Lunch is more energy. James Chance is more commercial in a different way, in funk and jazz. They were all doing original things, trying to create their own sound and music. I think they're all great.

I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws.

I am not doing something that it is experimental music in relation to classical music.

The academic area of new music or modern music festivals is not something which attracts me at all.

The Zombies were really unique - they had elements of jazz and classical music in their songs and songwriting. They had a very, very different sound compared to a lot of their contemporaries at the time.

I like Philip Glass. I think he's made some really great contributions to his field. I love his style of playing - it's very loop-style.

As a trumpet player, I was playing Xenakis, Lindberg: very challenging, technical, atonal, and I enjoyed it.

New music? Hell, there's been no new music since Stravinsky.

All old music was modern once, and much more of the music of yesterday already sounds more old-fashioned than works which were written three centuries ago.

When Talking Heads started, we called ourselves Thinking Man's Dance Music.

The simple act of sitting down and playing something enormously complex and spiritually uplifting on a harpsichord just bores kids to tears. There's no sizzle, there's no grab. But it's the great lesson of serious music, that it invites you to listen, rather than demands that you listen.

PC Music is a really post-modern attempt at pop.

I have loved Elliott Carter's music for many years.

'Deconstruction' is a really heavy record, a real symphony in a lot of ways, but with heavy musicians from the metal world - friends of mine.