Victor Borge Quotes

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

Studying music involves a lot of mathematics and a lot of exercises of memory. Or you've got to be able to be like somebody, to play like somebody, to play Mozart's music the way he played it and how he intended it. You've got to make it perfect, and that's not what I want to do. Although it is beautiful.

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

I'm an interpreter of music.

Do you know that my very first experience as a composer was a 'Concerto for Accordion?'

My music is simple stuff. Anybody can sit down, look at a set of symbols and produce sounds the music represents.

It's easy to play any musical instrument: all you have to do is touch the right key at the right time and the instrument will play itself.

I played piano, I learned a lot about music.

Western music is Bach, Handel and Schubert. It's good music, cleverly done. As a musician, I can see that.

In contrast, traditional classical music starts from an abstract musical schema. This is then notated and only expressed in concrete sound as a last stage, when it is performed.

But I find that the keyboard is the complete instrument you know?

Music is at once the product of feeling and knowledge, for it requires from its disciples, composers and performers alike, not only talent and enthusiasm, but also that knowledge and perception which are the result of protracted study and reflection.

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

My thinking musically has always been more advanced - it is difficult to get it down onto paper sometimes, even now.

There is a world of difference between a Mahler eighth note and a normal eighth note.

Boulez seemed to me to be a guy who wrote laws. Like a company lawyer.

I don't listen to much modern composition.

All you have to do is play one note. But it needs to be the right note.

I can play songs that I hear from a movie and just play it a few times on the keyboard. I will hit all the notes on the keyboard until I find the right key, and then I will play the rest of the song.

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.

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

I never learned to verbalize an abstract musical concept. No thank you. The whole point of being a serious musician is to avoid verbalization whenever you can.

I've never really been schooled in music theory. I'm a guitar player, and I attack the guitar in a certain way that it not fully unique to me, but it's more unique that some other people.

I grew up playing classical piano and percussion.

I was playing 'The Flight of the Bumblebee,' and I totally forgot the ending, so I performed the whole piece again, and I still couldn't remember it.