Walter Becker Quotes

I don't know anything about music theory at all. Zero. But I don't really need to.

I studied classical music in high school.

My whole musical life has been an educational process, and I'm just furthering my education and filling in the blanks. There's stuff that I want to know that I don't know.

Studying music in a conservatory would be stifling for me, although I respect people who can do it. And by no means am I an expert at notating music or music theory - that's not really my world.

You cannot go wrong by learning classical music because it trains the ear.

I do remember actually learning chords to Beatles songs. I thought they were great songwriters.

When I was four years old, my mother put me into a school for early music education where you get perfect pitch and harmony and composition.

I wrote music as soon as I knew notation.

I would like to teach music. It's weird the way they teach music in schools like Julliard these days.

I'm not a professional; I lack even basic knowledge about writing music.

It's easy to get next to music theory, especially between your peers and music classes and so forth. You just pay attention. I had a good ear, so I realized that printed music was just about reminding you what to play.

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

I studied classical music for a year. Then, I studied jazz for a year at the New School, and then I got kicked out. You had to go to your class, so I don't know if that counts as studying. I didn't study jazz. I was supposed to.

My mother is a retired music teacher. She taught me in high school, and she would take us and put us in these madrigal groups. We would go to a museum or whatever and just perform.

I've been devoting quite a bit of my time to harmonic studies on my own, in libraries and places like that. I've found you've got to look back at the old things and see them in a new light.

My reading of serious books about serious music is seriously compromised by the way that I can't understand any musical theory. Any mentions of D major or C minor are meaningless to me.

I'm a real musician's musician: I get really geeky on chords and arrangements.

I learnt everything to do with music in my own time.

I got a classical piano training when I was little, and we also had music study lessons where we'd have to listen to a lot of classical music.

It's like I've been in music school my whole life.

I went to college to study the piano and cello.

I started at such a young age learning every style of music, the country and the bluegrass and the western swing and the rock - everything.

What I love more than anything in the entire world is making music. It's what I studied in school.

I got an A for music and it was at school that I learned to build a beat.

I don't much listen to music as I study it: who's doing what, who wrote it.