Rhiannon Giddens Quotes

It started when I was eight years old. I first heard the cello on the radio, and I loved the sound. It was such a magical, beautiful sound. I dedicated my entire childhood to cello, practising like crazy.

We have to go and show these people what classical music is. We say sometimes that classical music has a small audience, but it's because people don't have the chance to be closer to it.

I started playing music when I was about six and didn't discover Indian classical music until I was fifteen. So, essentially, I had a lot of catching up to do.

The amazing thing about music is that however many thousands of records I've got now, I know that there are still thousands more that I haven't even begun to discover.

I turned popular music on the radio, and I never listened to it again after that, in about 1985. That's when I switched over to classical music, and I pretty much stayed with that since then.

There's so much music from Led Zeppelin that I think I overlooked when I was a kid because I didn't understand it, so now to revisit it at an older age, I have a deeper appreciation for it.

I was probably 7 years old when I started playing the guitar and writing some serious songs.

I would hate to think that some people have found themselves in a musical cul-de-sac and have ceased to explore new music, or at least music that is new to them, because they are so glued to the past.

Eventually, the more I listened and became obsessed with singers, I feel like the more I realized that I had my own little thing that I could do. So this is why I just became obsessed with looking for new singers, unknown singers, people that maybe have been forgotten, and really checking them out and analyzing what they do.

It wasn't until high school that I realized Avenged Sevenfold was picking up locally.

I was enamored with music at a very young age. Everything started with kundiman, then evolved to Carpenters, Barbra Streisand, Barry Manilow, and eventually classic rock music.

My training in music has been very eclectic - as first a flute player from classical chamber music to jazz, Greek, Brazilian and African music to contemporary concert music.

I must have been about 13 when I first heard Linkin Park and, to be honest, music had never played that much of a part in my life to that point.

I'd go over to friends' houses and ask them to put on some Howlin' Wolf, and they wouldn't know what I was talking about. Then, when they would come over to my house, I'd play them some blues. Their parents wouldn't let them come back. The blues were still called 'race records' back then.

MTV is where it all started for me.

As a professional cellist, I go to mostly classical concerts because that's the music I play, but I am also always trying to find out who the voices of our time are. I attend a spectrum of concerts that are close to classical - anything from Wynton Marsalis to Renee Fleming.

One of the most rewarding things is meeting someone after a concert who has never been to a concert before. It is incredibly rewarding when they say, 'This is my first classical concert.' It is really exciting for everyone.

'Salt' is like this snapshot in midair, an action shot. It's about my relationship with the church, the classical and choral music that I dealt with in school, and my new introduction to jazz. It's very hard for me to listen to from beginning to end, because I hear how lost I was.

In Germany, people feel like they own classical music, that it is somehow theirs. Over there, everyone still learns to play, and the great composers don't seem alien.

So, when I was eight or nine my mom's friend gave her a big purple bag full of cassettes and I found Seals and Crofts' 'Summer Breeze'... When I found it I stopped going through the bag because I was like, well, I'm not going to find anything better than this. I just thought it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever heard.

My bassist Jorgen Jorgensen opened up my life to a lot of great, obscure old soul records.

I don't even want to say I'm trying to necessarily popularize classical music, I just want to take this thing, this cello, this sound, and make it artistic so people can understand it today.

'Wages Of Sin' was the first metal album I ever bought, and it was love at first listen.

Ask about music growing up, I'll tell you I grew up playing classical music, and I didn't grow up in a musical household.

I had never really liked the music by Gabriel Faure, but just by chance, listening to some pieces by him, I got very interested. So I listened to almost everything. All the pieces written by him. I was digging deeper and deeper. I'm not sure I still like his music or not, but it's interesting.