Anoushka Shankar Quotes

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

When I feel like improvising, I always improvise on the guitar, never on the lute. It's as natural to me as breathing.

My musical knowledge is so bad it's embarrassing. When composers discuss music with someone as primitive as myself, they have to talk about it in terms of senses and emotion, rather than keys and tempo.

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

I'm an interpreter of music.

But I find that the keyboard is the complete instrument you know?

Do you know that my very first experience as a composer was a 'Concerto for Accordion?'

My thinking musically has always been more advanced - it is difficult to get it down onto paper sometimes, even now.

When you play the 12-string guitar, you spend half your life tuning the instrument and the other half playing it out of tune.

I don't think I could have ever had a career as a pianist because I never ever wanted to play the notes the way they were written, I was too sloppy to learn them quite right.

I only know two pieces; one is 'Clair de Lune' and the other one isn't.

It's easy to play any musical instrument: all you have to do is touch the right key at the right time and the instrument will play itself.

The cello is such a versatile instrument. It can rock like the hardest rock guitar, and it can sing like the human voice. We couldn't do what we do without the classical training. It's a hard instrument to play. There are no frets, and it takes finesse and technique to play.

I played piano, I learned a lot about music.

I've never known how to read music in my life.

The further the music develops, the more complex the apparatus used by the composer to express his thoughts becomes.

I never learned to verbalize an abstract musical concept. No thank you. The whole point of being a serious musician is to avoid verbalization whenever you can.

I think when you're learning an instrument, you are restricted because much of it is the noise of individual theory and your ability to play the instrument.

I've never really been schooled in music theory. I'm a guitar player, and I attack the guitar in a certain way that it not fully unique to me, but it's more unique that some other people.

Many, many composers have only found their way to a certain form, through familiarizing themselves with texts.

It's very demanding to make up your own music.

No, improvising is wonderful. But, the thing is that you cannot improvise unless you know exactly what you're doing.

If I get an idea for a song, I have a melody for it. I'm a musician first. I'm not limited by the fretboard.

I actually write more on guitar than I do on piano.

I don't read music. I've never had a lesson. I don't know anything about music other than what my inner knowledge is.