Donald Byrd Quotes

I'm an interpreter of music.

The creative process of composing music has always fascinated me.

I feel pretty comfortable in a lot of different musical styles. I like rhythm, and I like melody and so forth.

My thinking musically has always been more advanced - it is difficult to get it down onto paper sometimes, even now.

My music is simple stuff. Anybody can sit down, look at a set of symbols and produce sounds the music represents.

I played piano, I learned a lot about music.

I've never really been schooled in music theory. I'm a guitar player, and I attack the guitar in a certain way that it not fully unique to me, but it's more unique that some other people.

I am so happy that I didn't go to school and I didn't have anyone to tell me how to position my fingers on the piano correctly. And what you do with music and what is the correct way to write it and what is not the correct way to write it.

It's very demanding to make up your own music.

I think musically.

I usually think in terms of music.

I don't ever consciously change gears when I play jazz or classical. It's all music.

In contrast, traditional classical music starts from an abstract musical schema. This is then notated and only expressed in concrete sound as a last stage, when it is performed.

I read and write classical piano and percussion, also guitar.

I'm not a person who writes really abstract things with oblique references. I look at abstraction like I look at condiments. Give me some Tabasco sauce, some ketchup, some mayonnaise. I love all of that. Put it on a trumpet. I've just got to have the ketchup and Tabasco sauce. That's my attitude about musical philosophy.

That's what it is that you rehearse - the making of music, not the playing of notes as abstractions.

I listened to many different types of instruments and music, and have always tried to look at the bass as an instrument as opposed to only a bass.

The advice I am giving always to all my students is above all to study the music profoundly... music is like the ocean, and the instruments are little or bigger islands, very beautiful for the flowers and trees.

Classical - perhaps I should say 'orchestral' - music is so digital, so cut up, rhythmically, pitchwise and in terms of the roles of the musicians. It's all in little boxes. The reason you get child prodigies in chess, arithmetic, and classical composition is that they are all worlds of discontinuous, parceled-up possibilities.

The orchestral or symphonic music never interested me.

From a very early period of my life I have derived the highest enjoyment from listening to music, especially to melody, which is to me the most pleasing form of composition.

I can play songs that I hear from a movie and just play it a few times on the keyboard. I will hit all the notes on the keyboard until I find the right key, and then I will play the rest of the song.

After conducting Wagner, Beethoven's triple concerto is like taking an Alka Seltzer.

I've always said that music is like literature.

I've never known how to read music in my life.