Caroline Shaw Quotes

It's impossible to play a run with as much feeling as a single note. I've never been so much into runs as making single notes cry.

Jazz is the only music in which the same note can be played night after night but differently each time.

That's what it is that you rehearse - the making of music, not the playing of notes as abstractions.

After playing now for 60 years, it's still very challenging for me to play a simple melody and have it clean and touch the reed at the proper time in the proper way.

I think the fundamental part of my technique is my vibrato.

If you listen to the way I speak, I have a lot of rhythm, use a lot of accents. When I'm playing my instrument, that concept comes through very clearly.

The most important thing is to make a percussive instrument a singing instrument. Teachers should stress this aspect in their instruction, but it seems that very few of them actually do.

Phrasing is the idea of finding sentences and using punctuation in speech. I often look at the score to see what's written in by the composer to see if I can find clues to those directions, like what direction did the composer have in mind, and I try to incorporate those things as much as possible.

In rock n' roll, there are notes that aren't like notes. They're something in between, and it's the way you scoop into it.

I don't have any legato skills; I could never figure out how to roll the notes off.

You really have to play with the space in a riff so it can be allowed to breathe.

They flat their fifths, we drink ours.

Music is the silence between the notes.

You have to have great passion, because to sing operatic music requires lots of work. I study for at least two hours every day. The voice is like an instrument and requires constant exercise.

When you hear Bach or Mozart, you hear perfection. Remember that Bach, Mozart and Beethoven were great improvisers. I can hear that in their music.

I play more rhythmically than I do a lot of notes.

My music wouldn't sound the way it does if I hadn't had the experience of conducting.

The composers could no longer direct all performances in person, and so the responsibility of interpreting their works in the spirit in which they had been conceived was placed upon conductors.

Trying to write music that's sensitive to 400 years ago takes a bit of madness, as it's such a long stretch of time.

Playing the violin and singing and whistling are just three different ways of making sound.

The art of interpretation is not to play what is written.

The real art of conducting consists in transitions.

Music is extremely intuitive, which acting too in a different way.

A lot of those little things that I really like doing are just moments of cool articulation, just little moments of phrasing that probably go over everybody's head.

The thing I try to do the most is to play in terms of the song and play in terms of what I'm hearing.