Gunther Schuller Quotes

I wish I'd gone to music school or just started playing in bands sooner.

I knew I wanted to be an actor for a long time, but I was based out of Chicago and then I went to New York and I did 'The Upright Citizens Brigade' out there. I had a two-man show with a guy named Oliver Ralli who's now in the band Pass Kontrol, which is a big band out of New York.

I was born in Manhattan on West 12th. My parents were kind of hippies and they did a home birth.

Let's be clear: I love singing at the Met.

I've always been in music. I started out in music, and I will continue to do music.

Music has always been something that I knew that I would eventually want to pursue.

I didn't sleep much in the summer of '98. Was getting ready to move to New York City. Start a band. That was a madman's summer. A summer of change.

I went to Europe in '52 or '53, and when I came back, I stopped in New York. I remember looking out of a window on a glorious October morning and there was New York. And I thought, 'I'm coming here. This is for me.'

I just started to do my own thing for about a year and a half, and I worked in the evening selling phonograph records. Then I said to myself, "I'm afraid I have to go to New York after all."

I'd love to do a musical actually. My background is in music. I have a bachelors in music. I thought that I was going to be a composer, long ago when I first started. So it was amazingly fun to do those two routines in the film.

I focused on the saxophone ever since high school. It wasn't until my album 'Poetica,' which I recorded in 2006, that I went back to the clarinet. It felt like it was waiting for me!

I simply love Wagner's music. That actually started very early. He was the first composer I was exposed very much to because my parents introduced me to Wagner's music very early.

My aunt played upright bass in the Louisville Orchestra, and I was always really impressed by her musical ability. I found it really fascinating as a kid that one could play music for a living.

I always wanted to be a composer, and I sort of went in to NYU as pre-med because I just thought, 'Well... who actually becomes a composer?'

By the time I was about 15, I was out playing gigs and knew I was going to be a musician.

I found my childhood scrapbook and there's an interview in there with dad from 1970. He talks about how long he's been playing the drums and he'd only been playing drums six years in 1970.

When my father saw that I was interested in following such a career he had many reservations. His feeling was that there was no chance to earn a livelihood unless I played jazz or something similar.

My father was a very big musical influence on me. He was a trumpet player. And that's what I started with. Then, when I was 7, my parents introduced me to the piano.

My son is a musician who next year will be attending the LaGuardia High School of Performing Arts in New York City, which his mother helped him get into by making him practice all the time.

Carnegie was a life-long dream because I was a born New Yorker. I was born in upstate New York, and we've played Radio City, and we've played The Beacon, but Carnegie was this mystical place, you know?

My family didn't want me to be a musician, and therefore, they never helped out in my efforts.

I came to New York with two bags, my guitar and my laptop. I set my stuff down and immediately ran to an audition.

My dad wanted to be a musician, so when I started playing guitar, he was like, 'Go for it.' That is what I did for ages; I was in bands. And then I went to university and got into comedy somehow.

I moved to New York when I was 17 for college.

I was in dire need of a band that was serious about getting out of El Paso.