Mack Wilberg Quotes

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

What comprises good performance? The ability through singing or playing to make the ear conscious of the true content and affect of a composition.

We should read music in the same way that an educated adult will read a book: in silence, but imagining the sound.

Is it not the business of the conductor to convey to the public in its dramatic form the central idea of a composition; and how can he convey that idea successfully if he does not enter heart and soul into the life of the music and the tale it unfolds?

In chamber music, the audience can hear each instrument and understand (and feel) what the composer and the musicians have in mind as they play.

I think it is your job as an artist to be able to hear a song.

Listening is the key to everything good in music.

I love interpreting other people's music.

Today, with a recording, he can hear the thing enough times until he really gets acquainted with the language, and then he can begin to make an estimate of the intrinsic, aesthetic value of that piece of music.

There's some people who are not understanding what Limp Bizkit is about. But, then again, who am I to tell people what they can use art for or how they can interpret it?

Every day we make more progress toward understanding the concert hall.

I knew all this Beatles music. I knew the songs phonetically. It was like my whole experience of that music was out of focus, and somebody put the perfect glasses on me, and all of a sudden I could see everything.

The great secret is that an orchestra can actually play without a conductor at all. Of course, a great conductor will have a concept and will help them play together and unify them. But there are conductors that actually inhibit the players from playing with each other properly.

I can't play any instrument for the life of me, but I know what I want to hear.

When you do a lyric for 'April in Paris,' those who have heard it before can hear it in a different way now. It can add perspective to a great piece of music that does not have a lyric and may be inaccessible to lot of ears because people don't deal with complex music very well.

There should be no boundaries in your relationship with sound. Often it's not about the music itself but the context in which you hear the music. For instance, listening to a piece of classical music in a film you love often changes your perception of it entirely.

I am compared to other classical musicians, but most of them perform songs from other people, and most of those composers belong to another era.

Just like using an instrument, a song calls for different things.

The right notes mean more than 1,000 mph arpeggios.

Popular music is one endless love song that, I suspect, the basically solitary Ella Fitzgerald approached much as the basically solitary Marianne Moore approached poetry: reading it with a certain contempt for it, Moore said, you could find a place in it for the genuine.

I started classical piano when I was eight, but I wasn't a virtuoso. I just really liked it.

Do you know it took me 27 years to understand the C major chord on the piano?

At the end of the day, I am singing the composer's creation, and I follow the instructions given to me. What I feel may be a right take may not work for the composer or his vision on how he thinks the song should sound.

All I really want is for people to really get what I do and connect with the songs and find meaning in them.

I'd rather you listen to my music with a confused face, you know? Rather than you just hearing a good flow to a good beat.