Claude Levi-Strauss Quotes

Music is its own language - if you don't speak it, it's hard to say what you're trying to do.

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.

Music, of almost any kind, always made sense to me.

Since age seven, I've been composing and have never stopped composing, yet, the creative process is as elusive to me as it has ever been.

My father taught me to read music and play the piano-but not well, even though people have said that I'm a natural musician.

I find little in the works of Beethoven, Berlioz, Wagner and others when they are led by a conductor who functions like a windmill.

The value of music is to be able to play one note at the right time in the right way.

What is music about? You can't listen to one era, one composer, and know what music is about.

I'm not musically inclined. It blows my mind that people can write music. I don't have that talent; I look up to the people that do.

All music has to speak in some form or other.

I can take any series of numbers and turn it into music, from Bach to bebop, Herbie Hancock to hip-hop.

Beethoven, Schubert, Schoenberg, Berg imply a type of pianist who is intellectual. That's not always associated with female soloists.

My head works in music, so there's always music there.

With few exceptions, music has been for some centuries the art which has devoted itself not to the reproduction of natural phenomena, but rather to the expression of the artist's soul, in musical sound.

The advice I am giving always to all my students is above all to study the music profoundly... music is like the ocean, and the instruments are little or bigger islands, very beautiful for the flowers and trees.

Music is a language, you see, a universal language.

Listening is the key to everything good in music.

And after I compose my programs, but it is very easy because I look to the music in a very natural way without fuss, and so I look always music, in my home, like books and books and books, choose books and you read the pages, so I do this with music, and I make programs.

My music is simple stuff. Anybody can sit down, look at a set of symbols and produce sounds the music represents.

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

From a very early period of my life I have derived the highest enjoyment from listening to music, especially to melody, which is to me the most pleasing form of composition.

I just happened to start playing music for the conceptual ideas.

I feel that I speak the musical language.

You must have the music to justify an instrument's extensive use.

Because essentially Schoenberg was an extremely gifted man. And in spite of many of his theories and so on, when he really began to write music, he still was guided very much by his internal hearing, by what we call your internal ear.