Andris Nelsons Quotes

If you look at these bands like The Beatles, they did something that was new for that time, whether it was shocking or just a new direction that they were going.

I do not think that music keeps evolving. It evolved through Bach; since then, in my humble opinion, all the innovations added nothing.

Music is changing. I'm just doing what I'm doing, and hopefully in the next 20, 30 years, some kids can take what I'm doing and change it again. If the music doesn't move, then it's dead.

Progressive music probably wouldn't even really exist if not for the people of the United States having picked up on it and nurtured it in the way they did. It really is an American form of music in the sense that it was nurtured here. So it belongs here. It has become part of the fabric of American musical culture.

People like Arvo Part would not have been taken seriously 20 years ago.

There used to be a certain condescension to Mozart. His music was regarded as pleasant. He was a porcelain figure playing a porcelain harpsichord.

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

There is a terrible conservatism, like a cancer, right in the heartlands of music-making, a tremendous resistance to change, an absolute horror of the idea that more people might connect with music. That infuriates me more than I can say.

I haven't written a score that's going to change the Western world or the musical as we presently know it.

Nothing I'm doing musically is revolutionary in any way, shape, or form.

Music is forever changing.

There is a reactionary conservative side of classical music, which is not the most exciting side of it. The side that draws me in, there's a real encouragement of risk-taking, going back to masters of that tradition like Beethoven and Bartok and Stravinsky.

There wasn't a lot of R&B cats doing songs at 120 beats per minute before 'Closer,' which I take full credit and responsibility for. That's all good, but it was an experiment. You experiment with something, if it goes good, cool, but you never forget where you come from and R&B is where I come from.

There are some composers - at the head of whom stands Beethoven - who not only do not know when to stop but appear to stop many times before they actually do.

Roll over Beethoven, tell Tchaikovsky the news.

People who try to create a musical revolution do not have a chance, but those who turn their back to music can sometimes find it.

I haven't heard anything so great for a long time; Beethoven snaps his fingers at the whole world.

There are people who will always want the genre, whatever it is, to stay traditional, to stay what it was like when you were 15 years old, but I just don't think music does that. Music is always changing and evolving, just like us as people.

Everybody in Lynyrd Skynyrd loves different styles of music, and our minds are very open when it comes to writing our songs and making the band true to what the band is, but also stepping out and doing something current.

Lil Uzi and I gave Philly different sounds by stepping outside of the box and not sticking to the stigma.

Obviously, any living musician born after 1960 has been touched by rock and roll. It's the music of our time, and it's 'in the air,' as Steve Reich would say. My experience of it is just really direct because I'm actually playing in a collaborative band.

I think that the first World War put an end the kind of music that Mahler, Bruckner and Richard Strauss were writing. A change of fashion was needed.

Today, somewhere in America, there's a kid who's got a laptop and a guitar and a couple of his friends he's putting together to play drums and bass, who's gonna change the way we say things, the way that we dress, the way we view things, the music we hear, everything.

Who am I to sit here and say I'm going to change the face of music?

I think we are really in touch with what's going on around us in the world of music, trying to push the bar forward and try new and exciting things that our fans can react to.