Olivier Messiaen Quotes

I try to get a degree of realism in my music.

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

I wanted to develop a guitar style where phrases and lines get there just in the nick of time, like with Curtis Mayfield and Steve Cropper. Subtleties mean so much, and there is a stunning beauty in them.

A good interpreter can take a piece of bad music and make it sound pretty decent, while a bad interpreter can take good music and make it sound cheap. I can tell that some people have a bad taste, and unlike on the piano, they smear around a lot, that is bad taste.

All you have to do is play one note. But it needs to be the right note.

I admire Tom Ades: he's a brilliant conductor, and he gets just the right hard, brilliant sound from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra for Russian music.

I've never understood people who play up the artifice of music.

The hardest of all the arts to speak of is music, because music has no meaning to speak of.

I was always pretty decent at fast stick work or doing stuff that seems impressive that's not really; I was pretty tasteful and had good ideas musically. But I had a terrible sense of tempo, which is like being a blind painter. The conductor would just rip into me, and it lasted for years.

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

Aaron Copland was a man that had a very specific point of view about what music should be which was that, he felt that new music should have the composer should show a personality in his music.

All music has to speak in some form or other.

These days I can really get the strings to snap if I want.

If you want me to play only the notes without any specific dynamics, I will never make one mistake.

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

There is a world of difference between a Mahler eighth note and a normal eighth note.

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 has nothing to do with your technical ability.

Can't you read? The score demands 'con amore', and what are you doing? You are playing it like married men!

Not only was it enough to be a cover band, it was perhaps the highest calling. After all, if you could play music recorded by others, stay true to the original, and still add fire and flare, why not?

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes ah, that is where the art resides.

What I really enjoy about writing for orchestras is realizing that - and it's kind of self-evident - but the fact that they are 48 individuals. It's not, you know, a preset on a keyboard. It's all these people who have opinions and who are making decisions about how to play.

I don't think so, in so far as I always aspired to play the way I do now but just couldn't get the sounds out always due to technical limitations - now I can pretty much play what I hear in realtime.

Trying to describe something musical is like dancing to architecture, it's really difficult.

Your personal history is a part of what happens with your hands and your head as you play music.