Walter Becker Quotes

Of the Queen tributes, some of them are very funny, and some of them are really not funny at all. The terrible ones are cheesy and pantolike, more about dressing up in a Brian May wig and a Freddie Mercury moustache, and what they're missing out is the fact that the music is quite complicated and actually not easy to perform.

I came from a Conservatoire background where the idea of complexity was very much bound up with good music - good music was seen as complex and difficult to understand.

Mozart is always a bit of a challenge - you know, even though it is often given to very young singers, it is actually the most complicated to sing in many instances.

While it is true that Frank had a great sense of humor, he was also very serious about composing music. In reality there are only a handful of skilled players who can play his most complex pieces. It takes a lot of patience to learn and requires a fantastic memory.

For me personally, Elliott Carter was and remains one of the most meaningful composers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries because he represents substance. He was the living proof of uncompromising, complex music, which at first seems inaccessible. But it becomes accessible if one digs in and sees the development through.

Each track has to be precise, and that is a problem on a rhythmically complex track like 'Slaughtered.'

The better the orchestra, often the harder it is to conduct, not the other way around.

Progressive metal is one of the hardest styles of music to pull off live, especially while providing a tasteful show.

Any time you sit out, it could throw off your rhythm a little bit, and I'm kind of a rhythm player.

I don't want to be hitting one day then not hitting my shots the next day.

Sometimes the simplest forms of music are the hardest to play. Especially for musicians that are accomplished.

If you look at the teams that mix and match their starting lineup a great deal, that sort of inconsistency frequently leads to inconsistency in performance.

My music is very, very precise. It's very rigorous. The forms are much more intricate than you would imagine.

I think I'll always feel a little in awe whenever I see someone in their 20s or 30s carrying a cello or violin case - because I know, if they're doing it professionally, how many years of practice have gone into being able to make music with them. And the sounds they can make just hit me very hard, and feel full of limitless complexity.

Americans' distrust of the conspicuously intellectual - a habit we learned, I suppose, on the frontier, but which remains a feature of the national character - has the virtue of puncturing the pretentious and exposing the fake, but it may also have impaired American listeners' patience for music that is especially complex or austere.

For listeners, the song 'Kehne ko jashn-e-baharaa hai' looks a very easy number. In fact, it was a challenge to sing the song as I had to really suppress my voice and make it appear like a casual track.

Anything that's resolvable is boring, musically. And if it's too chaotic, you don't feel tension; it's chaos.

We can guarantee you that 15 to 30 seconds of any of our songs are going to be good. The rest, we can't guarantee.

Normally, I can get through a whole show with one guitar pick.

It was never so much the heavy metal thunder that got me. I was into players who played with taste and did these walking bass parts. If you can play like that, it really opens up the music. You can't just pound away. After a while it's like, 'So what? What else you got?'

Listen to the triple fugue in 'Magnificat' - the first subject is seven voices, the second one has 52 different voices, the third uses five; then I combine all together. Such textures you cannot call primitive.

When I sing with Loaded, I can't move at all. I'm playing guitar, and I'm singing.

The team that can be consistent - for the most part all year - is going to be the team that is going to get into the playoffs.

Over the season you have waves. It is very hard to go through the whole season at the same standard and winning games in the same way.

The musical training taught me to focus my mind, before playing in an orchestra taught me how to truly concentrate. If you miss your moment in an orchestra, there is no forgiving.