Peter Maxwell Davies Quotes

Great music was written by the great geniuses, and you want to do it justice.

A song versus an album is not like a scene versus a play.

I was drawn to love songs, but I was just drawn to great music - no matter if it's hip-hop, pop, R&B or whether it's rock n' roll or country. It could be a Garth Brooks song, and if it's a smash, then I'll love the different wordplay and different melodies. That's what I'm a fan of - great music.

Here's how I understand music. If you can play the same bunch of noise twice, it's music. To go beyond that is supercilious and pontificating.

I can take any series of numbers and turn it into music, from Bach to bebop, Herbie Hancock to hip-hop.

It's quite hard to have your mom as a teacher - it's like, she's not necessarily a 'real teacher' for me. But she'd always teach me to really hear the music, and develop my ear, and to try and hear the harmonics of the piano.

Music is a really great creative tool for me, for different roles.

I'm an interpreter of music.

Great music is its own movie, already. And the challenge, as a music fan, is to keep the song as powerful as it wants to be, to not tamper with it and to somehow give it a home.

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

Music. It's all creativity right here, right now.

The fact is that great musical pieces take and hold the stage because they provide great emotional experiences.

I love doing concert music.

I wanted to give people a taste of my own music through the sound and style of my covers.

A good interpreter can take a piece of bad music and make it sound pretty decent, while a bad interpreter can take good music and make it sound cheap. I can tell that some people have a bad taste, and unlike on the piano, they smear around a lot, that is bad taste.

Great music is great music, period.

I think recordings have been a terrific advance because now, when you have a piece of music, particularly something that appears to the listener very complicated, there's really a push to the world to try to figure out what it was that he was hearing.

Conductors' careers are made for the most part with 'Romantic' music. 'Classic' music eliminates the conductor; we do not remember him in it.

Out of all the artistic things I do, music is the most rewarding because it's so hard to write songs.

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.

Composition is definitely what I'm born to do, and it came last.

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

I've always said that music is like literature.

I played piano, I learned a lot about music.

The further the music develops, the more complex the apparatus used by the composer to express his thoughts becomes.