Charles Rosen Quotes

I like Bach. I like Randy Newman.

I admire Johann Strauss a lot. I believe he was a genius of his time.

Richard Wagner, a musician who wrote music which is better than it sounds.

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

I work to Glenn Gould in the morning and go to sleep listening to Parsifal.

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

Everybody can dig The Beatles, but why should everybody dig us?

Classical, Romantic, and Baroque music, that's what I really like.

I love gentle, gorgeous classical music such as Mozart.

Guitar music or rock n' roll or whatever you want to call it sort of goes away with trends, but it'll never go away completely. It can't die because it's so fundamentally attractive.

The piece that had a large influence on me was Turangalila.

In blues, classical and jazz, you get more revered with age.

The orchestral or symphonic music never interested me.

The thing about influence is that any composer worth anything will give you the same names.

I cannot listen to Beethoven or Mahler or Chopin or Bach when I write because those composers require you stop what you are doing and listen.

The audiences are there as a result of my history with the band but also as a result of my being able to reach people with a tune.

If you want to find the source of much of the music of modern day Russia, you will find it in the incredible compositions of that crazed lunatic Berlioz.

I love stuff like Mozart.

I'm not deluded enough to think that everyone who knows my name is a listener. You know, I hope that part of that interest - part of that public interest - has to do with me still making records that people like.

I like to sing to Verdi, I like singing to Sibelius, and Mahler maybe.

Pulse as an active means of expression, Stravinsky and Beethoven are the two masters of that.

Then I started listenin' a lot to classical composers. Piano works. Just to see what they were doin'. That sort of put me in a different groove to try to blend all that in.

All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.

I am a classical music lover - not necessarily the contemporary stuff, but the old stuff.

I'm not a culture snob. So while, of course, I think the Mozart 'Requiem' or, say, Beethoven's 'Ninth' are some of the greatest works of art in the history of humankind, that's not to say the Beatles or Queen or Simon and Garfunkel aren't brilliant, beautiful, important works of art that should be sung without a sense of irony.