Wadada Leo Smith Quotes

Pulse as an active means of expression, Stravinsky and Beethoven are the two masters of that.

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

Mozart has written opera, symphony, sacred and chamber music - not to mention his piano and violin concerti.

In my next lifetime, I want to come back as a composer.

My grandmother was fond of painting and playing the piano. She had been given lessons by Emmanuel Chabrier, who used to spend the summer months in nearby Membrolle.

When the bright angel dominates, out comes a great work of art, a Michelangelo David or a Beethoven symphony.

There are some composers - at the head of whom stands Beethoven - who not only do not know when to stop but appear to stop many times before they actually do.

Perhaps Bach and Beethoven are strange bedfellows for Mickey Mouse, but it's all been a lot of fun.

I was raised a musician and I played classic music, violin, in orchestras and music comedy theaters, I have music running around in my head all the time, and if I hear music that's too interesting, I have to pay attention to it.

I haven't heard anything so great for a long time; Beethoven snaps his fingers at the whole world.

all this Beethoven and rain

Beethoven was just music, and it didn't matter if he could hear it or not - he could feel it. He could hear it in his mind. He could write it down hearing it in his mind. He was just music. Yeah, he's one of my favorite writers of all times.

If you look back, Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven were mixing music and humor all the time.

We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it's opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There's so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.

I decided I wanted to be a musician when I saw the movie 'Amadeus' around 1987. I was five years old, so it was a good time to start piano lessons after seeing Tom Hulce who played Mozart play the harpsichord on his back with his hands crossed. Such a great movie to inspire a five-year-old.

I shall always respect the composer. If I embellish, it is his idea I am embellishing.

My dad and I watched 'Amadeus' when I was 6, and I knew I wasn't going to be an engineer.

It was my 16th birthday - my mom and dad gave me my Goya classical guitar that day. I sat down, wrote this song, and I just knew that that was the only thing I could ever really do - write songs and sing them to people.

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.

In my own life I studied music, not creative writing; I see a novel as music - an opening as an overture, themes and subplots as lines in a fugue. The chance to write a novel about a musician boxed in by all kinds of limitations but who plays out his ultimate struggle for freedom at the piano was irresistible.

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

If you want to find the source of much of the music of modern day Russia, you will find it in the incredible compositions of that crazed lunatic Berlioz.

To my mind and ear, there is simply nothing that compares to the musical sophistication of a late Beethoven, Bartok, Schubert or Brahms work for minimal forces.

God gives you the gift of melody or He doesn't - it's as simple as that.

The people at the record company had asked me if I could write a song about my life, my relationship with God, and where I'm from. Well, I can't write a song on purpose, my songs come in a moment of inspiration or desperation.