Edna St. Vincent Millay Quotes

What people really should be able to be confident in is that the standards of music- making that classically trained musicians present is elite, it is the best and all of us as artists should be committed to that.

The Gershwin legacy is extraordinary because George Gershwin died in 1937, but his music is as fresh and vital today as when he originally created it.

Mozart's music is so pure and beautiful that I see it as a reflection of the inner beauty of the universe.

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

Certain things in Mozart will and can never be excelled.

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

I think J. S. Bach's music stands among humankind's greatest accomplishments. For me, Bach's music is not only as good as music gets but also as good as it gets, period - as good as existence, reality, life, and the world.

Bob Dylan is someone that - I don't care how long into the future it is - somebody will still play Bob Dylan. He will always survive.

Shostakovich was one of the great symphonists of all time, and maybe the last great symphonist.

I've got that Beethoven energy, that Stravinsky energy. And it's all a gift from the Creator.

Chopin is a great composer who influenced many, many important composers. He was a great innovator, especially in harmony.

George's contribution to the great archive of contemporary music rests alongside the immortals. His is a legacy of unquestionable brilliance and one which will continue to shine and resonate for generations to come.

Jazz isn't like pop, where you sell millions of records with a hit. Your spirit and soul aren't important in pop music. But jazz is like classical music. If people like you, they'll remember you and you'll last forever.

The music of Mozart is of such purity and beauty that one feels he merely found it - that it has always existed as part of the inner beauty of the universe waiting to be revealed.

Mozart combined high formality and playfulness that delights as no other composition in any other medium does.

Listening to Mozart, we cannot think of any possible improvement.

If one were asked to name one musician who came closest to composing without human flaw, I suppose general consensus would choose Johann Sebastian Bach.

The real Brahms is nothing more than a sentimental voluptuary

I think that if I were required to spend the rest of my life on a desert island, and to listen to or play the music of any one composer during all that time, that composer would almost certainly be Bach. I really can’t think of any other music which is so all-encompassing, which moves me so deeply and so consistently, and which, to use a rather imprecise word, is valuable beyond all of its skill and brilliance for something more meaningful than that — its humanity.

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.

Beethoven's last quartets were written by a deaf man and should only be listened to by a deaf man.

Mozart has the classic purity of light and the blue ocean; Beethoven the romantic grandeur which belongs to the storms of air and sea, and while the soul of Mozart seems to dwell on the ethereal peaks of Olympus, that of Beethoven climbs shuddering the storm-beaten sides of a Sinai. Blessed be they both! Each represents a moment of the ideal life, each does us good. Our love is due to both.

Bach is the supreme genius of music... This man, who knows everything and feels everything, cannot write one note, however unimportant it may appear, which is anything but transcendent. He has reached the heart of every noble thought, and has done it in the most perfect way.

Yeah, you're a regular Mozart...well, except for the whole music thing.

... Andres Segovia literally created the genre of classical guitar, which hadn't existed before around 1910. There was flamenco, which he borrowed from, but he actually arranged the works of Mozart and other classical composers for guitar, something that had never been done before ... Segovias' style is not slick or contrived, but it's still very clean and his timing is impeccable ... it's got a feeling of casual elegance, as if he's sitting around the house in Spain with a jug of wine, just playing from the heart.