Daniel Levitin Quotes

I'm a natural piano player. So all the practicing I do at this point is in my head. If I don't play for a year, my chops aren't going to get any worse. I've spent my time playing scales, and I don't necessarily want to play any faster than I play. So everything I do at this point is more philosophical.

I didn't have to apply my mind to the aspects of scales and playing, and instead, I focused on creativity. I wrote music, but I didn't 'practice' it. So yeah, you can always get better and improve your technique, but hopefully, that comes through being a musician and composing and being a creative individual.

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

I feel pretty comfortable in a lot of different musical styles. I like rhythm, and I like melody and so forth.

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

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.

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

I used to play the piano by listening to it - like Chopin pieces, when I was, like, a little kid - and then the minute my parents got me lessons to read music, I couldn't do it anymore.

I can play songs that I hear from a movie and just play it a few times on the keyboard. I will hit all the notes on the keyboard until I find the right key, and then I will play the rest of the song.

I started studying music at the age of five and a half. My older sister was taking piano lessons. When her teacher left our apartment, I would get up on the piano bench and start picking out the notes that were part of my sister's lessons.

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 remember learning how to play 'The Fool On The Hill' on piano when I was in maybe fifth grade.

I was always playing the Hammond Organ back to front even during the days of the Nice, going back to 1968. Really what I was doing there, was choosing notes at random and trying to make some sense of them, improvising back to front.

All my musical foundations go back to the age of 3. My family tell me that I used to listen to the old crystal set, then go to the piano and pick out the tune that I just heard.

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.

If there is no music, I will perish. While I have not learnt music, I can play the tune that comes into my head on the keyboard.

I can't even read music. All I know is whether I think it sounds good and if I like what I'm doing.

The thing with music education is that it is good at teaching technique, but not texture. You only learn about that from listening to music and experimenting on your own.

I don't think you can have a calculated approach towards learning music.

If you can say something special on the guitar, then you're going to perk my ears up. But if you're just gonna run through all the scales, then I can always find something else to listen to.

A couple of my friends had guitars, and I remember messing with them, but I was often intimidated by it. I think I sat down at a piano once when I was really young, but that was it.

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

Studying music involves a lot of mathematics and a lot of exercises of memory. Or you've got to be able to be like somebody, to play like somebody, to play Mozart's music the way he played it and how he intended it. You've got to make it perfect, and that's not what I want to do. Although it is beautiful.

My father taught me to read music and play the piano-but not well, even though people have said that I'm a natural musician.

We all do 'do, re, mi,' but you have got to find the other notes yourself.