Doc Severinsen Quotes

I studied opera for a year at Georgia State University, but I wasn't interested in that meticulous, technical approach to music. So I left school and went back to jazz.

I started playing harp about fourteen years ago.

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

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

If I play anything that sounds like a solo, it's gonna sound like a lyric.

I don't listen to much modern composition.

When you're playing the part of a saxophone or a trumpet player, both of which I have done, it would be nice to be able to play like John Coltrane, but you can't. Your job is to do something else. And I'm not sure what it is, but I don't think I'd be acting Niels Bohr any better if I went and studied physics for five years.

That's the beauty of music. You can take a theme from a Bach sacred chorale and improvise. It doesn't make any difference where the theme comes from; the treatment of it can be jazz.

I like to sing to Verdi, I like singing to Sibelius, and Mahler maybe.

I grew up playing classical piano and percussion.

People are always defining and re-defining music. My style of playing has been characterized as smooth jazz and acid jazz. I listen as I play; I'm not caught up in defining the type of music I play.

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.

Learning a play is one thing, but to learn to play Vivaldi's 'Four Seasons' without music: that's brilliant.

This is no condemnation of Chuck Berry, who I greatly admire. But Chuck Berry's music will not translate as well to orchestration because of its very three-chord rock 'n' roll nature. It is the music of the artists that are more pretentious, pompous or closer to the kind of big dramatic stylings that orchestras are good with.

I want to take the great tradition of the orchestra within me, to take what the orchestra offers.

When I was 5 or 6, I was messing around with the piano, and I listened to everything from Chopin to boogie-woogie.

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.

Music is something you can't really put in terms like in a sport, like running or football - that you win if you score more. In music, there's nothing like that.

I don't believe in a composer who is only able to compose, who can't play or conduct, can only use a computer. If that trend continues there will be no more symphonies, no more oratorios.

I always felt of myself as a composer, performer, improviser. I've never called myself a jazz man. I make art.

I didn't have to apply my mind to the aspects of scales and playing, and instead, I focused on creativity. I wrote music, but I didn't 'practice' it. So yeah, you can always get better and improve your technique, but hopefully, that comes through being a musician and composing and being a creative individual.

Michael Berkeley's 'Sonata' is very - what can you say - melodious.

Just like using an instrument, a song calls for different things.

The right notes mean more than 1,000 mph arpeggios.

Improvising is writing, too - there was no music and now there's music. So that's composition. And any time you take any sort of a performance liberty, you're making a compositional choice. I don't know a serious performer who hasn't made compositional decisions, who hasn't engaged in the art of composition.