Ludwig Goransson Quotes

Classical music gives musicians a kick. But African music gives everyone a kick.

Music in Africa is perceived so differently than Western classical music - it's language and storytelling.

The more I got into playing guitar, the more I enjoyed music, and the broader my listening became. The instrument itself became important to me, and I started messing around with classical guitar and took classical lessons.

I became a professional musician and played all kinds of music. I played bluegrass, I played classical music, and for many years, I played jazz.

There's a similarity between European and North African folk musics.

I went to school to learn guitar, solfeggio, and harmony. I wanted to know more about music, how it works. I wanted to take voice lessons, too, and that's when I discovered what I could do with my voice. At the beginning, I thought I would do classical and pop, but then I learned that I really liked the classical music.

I can play pretty much 1-5.

I love to learn, and I started doing a lot of studying of Spanish-style music and really started getting into it and how it is just a completely different form of guitar playing. It is just like if you started speaking in a different language like Japanese or something. It is something that you have to study and work at a lot.

It is an agreeable and yet a painful sense of novelty to stand for the first time in the midst of a people whose language and manners are different from one's own.

The key to longevity is to learn every aspect of music that you can.

House music is about love, and lots of hip hop is about hate and intolerance, so in that respect, it's not good at all.

I write arrangements. I'm sort of a wannabe composer.

I worked on scores. I went to the musical library in Berlin which is very famous. I discovered that we had scores of Beethoven, printed scores of Beethoven, that are full of mistakes. Not the wrong or false notes, but the wrong dynamic, understandable things.

In the olden days, I believe Mozart also improvised on piano, but somehow in the last 200 years, the whole training of Western classical music - they don't read between the lines, they just read the lines.

My father was always playing the piano. He played all kinds of music - Gershwin, all kinds of stuff.

I wasn't making it with the violin because I was playing all of the 'long hair' stuff.

I am consciously not trying to bring in World Music elements. The ways that I work and feel are completely different in how they sound than someone playing the Kora in Africa would play it.

Classical music only really came into my life in 1969. I wish I had heard classical music and church music when I was a teenager or even as a child.

I enjoy all forms of music - pop, classical and opera.

There are so many wonderful, wonderful musicians in the world, I cannot possibly make a distinction between the fact that they might play classical music, or bluegrass, or Irish traditional, or Indian music.

I don't think that you can write music if you don't know how to play an instrument. You have to know the basics, then you can go forward.

Yeah, I can read music and I know the names of chords.

The academic area of new music or modern music festivals is not something which attracts me at all.

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.

I'm going to try and make you take the Beatles and Eric Clapton as seriously as the Berlin Philharmonic and Simon Rattle.