Suzanne Farrell Quotes

Once you start playing a piece, there is a connection between every note. You cannot say, 'I will not concentrate on this note.' You cannot ignore things the way you do in the rest of your life.

The musical training taught me to focus my mind, before playing in an orchestra taught me how to truly concentrate. If you miss your moment in an orchestra, there is no forgiving.

Shut Up and Play your Guitar.

To play music, you have to understand it. I didn't understand 'Topographic Oceans.' That's why I hardly played on it. It frustrated me no end - and playing the whole thing on tour, I got farther and farther away from it.

I am playing the violin, that's all I know, nothing else, no education, no nothing. You just practice every day.

What I try to impart to a musician is to really try to practice the instrument in a really sincere way. Learn as much about music as you possibly can. Learn composition. Study to try to create compositions of your own and put your own personal touch on your music.

On those long notes behind the trumpet solo, if anyone lets his mind wander for a minute he is dead.

Reading music is something that's inherently hateful to me. It makes music like mathematics.

I just can't read music.

A lot of drummers get sidetracked by the instrument. It can engulf you.

I never learned to read music.

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

It has never been necessary for me to learn how to read music.

Music does not carry you along. You have to carry it along strictly by your ability to really just focus on that little small kernel of emotion or story.

I want to learn to sight-read music. And to play the bass pedals on the organ. Those are my only ambitions.

Classical music requires an immense amount of concentration, and I don't know if I would've been that committed to that particular life.

I've never mastered the guitar. Either I was playing it, or it was playing me; it depends how you look at it. As a kid, the only things I had to do was go to school, do my homework, and play guitar.

A lot of times I wish I would have learned to read music, but I'm very impatient.

When I was a little boy and played Liebestraum, my father used to hit me on the head with a newspaper every time I slopped the cadenza . . . I hate Liebestraum.

I cannot write music. I cannot play the piano.

A musicologist is a man who can read music but can't hear it.

The more obstinately you try to learn how to shoot the arrow for the sake of hitting the goal, the less you will succeed in the one and the further the other will recede.

The conductor has the advantage of not seeing the audience.

Yeah, I can read music and I know the names of chords.

I do read music, but I prefer playing from the heart.