Michael Feinstein Quotes

I want to make sure that I make music that lasts. I've been experimenting. I've been writing.

Charlie Parker and Art Tatum to me were genius, and I'm right below that. I did, in my own way, do something different on the instrument, and that's the way I'd like to be remembered.

As far as songwriters, I've always been a fan of Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and George Gershwin; those guys mean a lot to me.

For many years, I've always been attached to what they call the Great American Songbook, and Kern was a great leader of that because he had the classical training of Europe. He impressed all the greatest composers, like Cole Porter and Gershwin. They couldn't believe he was writing the songs he was writing.

I wanted to grow up to be George and Ira Gershwin from the age of about six.

Shostakovich was one of the great symphonists of all time, and maybe the last great symphonist.

You can't really take it for granted that people listen to your music. I want to write songs that are on par, at least in my mind, with the ones I've loved for my whole life and that will be around forever.

I was always drawn to Broadway musicals, and obviously composers like Gershwin, Rodgers, Berlin and Porter were writing music that I found wildly impressive.

He's a world-famous name to people who care about his music, but there are many people who have never heard of George Gershwin and those numbers increase.

I want to write music that will outlive me.

When Coltrane died, a void appeared in this music that has not been filled yet. He maintained a forward motion in his work and did not look back.

I have tried, in all the ways I can, to make timeless music.

I got my interest in Lotte Lenya and the Brecht-Weill canon from my parents. And I love classical music - I got that from my parents. I love Cole Porter - that I got from my dad.

I want to make music that stands the test of time.

I feel very fortunate to have been associated with people such as Rodgers and Hammerstein. I think they were geniuses of their time.

I grew up with singers. My father's mother sang opera. My dad was a big band singer. I can't remember a time there wasn't music in the house, so I grew up listening to great songwriters - George Gershwin, Cole Porter - and my grandma was playing opera for me before I was 3.

I kept looking to do songs that were written years ago and would live or outlive all of us, and the one thing they had in common was Sinatra.

To understand Mozart's contradictory qualities would indeed be to understand genius.

All roads for me lead back to Mozart. In his tragically short life, he breathed new life, fire and meaning into every form of music that existed in his time.

I love Gershwin. I love musicals.

When I'm dead, I wanna leave a body of work, like authors or great painters do. I don't wanna get ideas above my station, but why shouldn't this be comparable? Pop music was supposed to be a flash in the pan, but here we are 50 years later, and it means something to us, and it always will do. It's incredibly important.

You look back at people like Elvis and The Beatles and still get their music because it's timeless. That's what I want.

I am convinced that 100 years from now, people will talk about Elliott Carter as one of the most important figures in the second half of 20th-century music.

I make a timeless music. I think I've made my mark as a lyricist and as an innovator and as a tastemaker.

I am so lucky that I have been part of and written songs that will always resonate no matter how old they get.