David Draiman Quotes

The world of classical music is so fascinating. It's a world that encompasses people from everywhere and erases the basic restraints of nationality; everyone is united by this common language of music.

I basically love classical music. I love a lot of musicians playing together and the whole culture of that, whether it's Indian or it's Western.

My father gave me formal education in raagdari. He died in Lahore in 1964 when I was 13. I was in the tenth year of school, and my father's brother took me into the qawwali ensemble and started giving me formal education in qawwali.

My father was a classical pianist, and my mother was a singer of just about everything.

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.

My first engagement with any art was music.

I also have a big love of classical music played on piano because this is the environment I grew up in my brother being one of the great masters in this world.

I grew up in an era where an orchestra was like a treasure chest.

I have an understanding of Queen and the way Freddie Mercury did his harmonies. I know what tablas sound like, because my father played a lot of Ustad Ali Akbar Khan.

I'd go over to my grandmother's house, and she'd be playing opera. They loved opera. Not only did they play it on the radio, but they played it on their piano. Everybody learned how to read music and how to play.

Here in New Orleans, what a lot of the musical families do - and this is a romantic concept on my part - is they teach their kids to tap dance first. Then after tap dance, you learn piano, and after piano, you get to pick between all the instruments that are out there.

I come from a big family of musicians, so I was lucky enough to grow up with guitars all around the house. Even though I didn't really know much at the time, my brother had a Les Paul Goldtop, and my dad always had this Fender or some bizarre Pedulla-Orsini guitar.

We had a bunch of instruments around the house. Like, I played different instruments, trumpet, bass, drums, piano, all that, but whatever I could get my hands on.

My daddy had been a fiddler, and I heard a lot of fiddle music as a child. I had a ukulele and had played along with him.

My mom was sort of involved in amateur dramatics like Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, and played the violin. My dad played banjo and piano and sang as well, so there was all this music in my childhood.

That was my first love growing up - classical orchestral music, especially Impressionism.

I didn't grow up with classical music. My father was a folk music singer.

Music was something that nobody in my family does.

When you hear composer, you think, like, Beethoven: guy in a powdered wig, at a piano, furiously scribbling on manuscript paper. That's not the only image that a composer should bring up, you know. But that's kind of what we've said it is.

I grew up in a family that was very musical, learned the blues and everything like that. And I became a little bit frustrated with the simplicity of rock n' roll and blues. I started listening to a lot of classical music - mainly Bach, Vivaldi.

I've always had a close connection to both rock and classical music.

Writing tonal music now, you are not writing into the 19th Century.

I played piano growing up. I played classical piano since I was 5, and I sang in choirs, and I sang in plays and musicals.

I was a drummer and I played the guitar.

It was the early days of Rock 'n' Roll in this country. We were all struggling to learn music, it might be Country, Jazz, Classical, Blues or even Rock 'n' Roll.