Daniel Barenboim Quotes

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.

But inspiration? - That's when you come home from abroad and are asked: Well, have you found inspiration? - and fortunately you haven't. But the impressions sink in, of course, and may emerge later: None of us has invented the house; that was done many thousands of years ago.

I've had shows as a painter, as a photographer, I've done shows as a sculptor. I've done a lot of different things and it all comes from experiences that you have in your life, in your creative environment. They all help - I don't even know if they help; maybe they make it worse but they all influence each other, for sure.

Everything I do is autobiographical in some way. 'Wayne's World' was me growing up in the suburbs of Toronto and listening to heavy metal, and 'Austin Powers' was every bit of British culture that my father, who passed away in 1991, had forced me to watch and taught me to love.

It is better to make a piece of music than to perform one, better to perform one than to listen to one, better to listen to one than to misuse it as a means of distraction, entertainment, or acquisition of 'culture.'

You can go down the list of great artists and kind of understand that they are products of their environment. Whether it's U2 or Henry Rollins or myself or Johnny Lydon, they're gonna be products of their environment.

I recognize very much in Hopper that it does look like the United States; it looks like the 30's and my first impressions of everything, all of which I have to deal with and which gets mixed up in my work and probably gets mixed up in everybody else's work too.

My second album was written while I was on the road promoting the first record. I tried to take my personal experiences and elevate them to universal experiences, so that I wasn't writing songs about living on a tour bus or being on a TV set for the first time.

I'm also fascinated by the interplay between personal history and the larger forces that form the context for our lives.

I am permanently a student of people who make great songs, but besides sort of learning by absorption, I just love listening to music, hearing what's going on, hearing new things or new old things.

I always wondered what it was like to be just a normal kid growing up in trying times or during a great moment in history.

I think it is most important for a teacher to play the pieces and studies that are being played by the student.

I don't know if I hadn't grown up poor, and in the neighborhood I did, if I would have had that much to bring to my art form. I call upon my past with characters.

You can really walk around a song and completely, if it's a good song, look at it from a lot of different angles. Johnny Cash with Rick Rubin illustrated that perfectly.

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.

I try to listen to as much as possible. I know some people really try to avoid music when they're writing and recording, but I am very inspired by so many different musicians, and I need to learn.

I've realized that I owe people a look behind the scenes of my own story, because I don't think anyone can have a true understanding of the music without an insight into where it came from.

At some point, I started listening to music a little differently. Rather than being like, 'Yo, this is dope - who made this?' it started being like, 'I wish I made this.'

Edgar Meyer's violin concerto was the first piece of contemporary music I worked on in any depth. I was 18 or 19.

I started going on YouTube and studying everybody who was super popular, from Taylor Swift to Beyonce to Michael Jackson to Chris Brown, just everybody... That's what helped me find my voice and helped me find how I write songs, just doing covers.

Along with a lot of other things, becoming a Bob Dylan fan made me a writer. I was never interested in figuring out what the songs meant. I was interested in figuring out my response to them, and other people's responses. I wanted to get closer to the music than I could by listening to it - I wanted to get inside of it, behind it, and writing about it through it, inside of it, behind it, was my way of doing that.

I had a lot of time to myself, and I would listen to a lot of music, mostly music that I knew fairly well and had a relationship with. And I'd think, well, what is it that I've never been able to do that this person or people are able to do with this song? Why haven't I been able to do it, and what can they do that I wish I could do? And then I'd try to do that. I'd start each day getting into the songs, and I'd think about how I might get closer to this music that I love, but haven't been able to make before.

I rarely listen to the music for the sheer pleasure. I'm listening for the tool, I'm listening for the instrument, I'm listening for the art.

I don't know where a poem comes from until after I've lived with it a long time. I've a notion that a poem comes from absolutely everything that every happened to you.

I never understood music. It seemed to me to be the maximum amount of noise conveying the minimum amount of information.