George Bernard Shaw Quotes

I listen mostly to live music, and mostly my musical experience was playing music with other people.

Well, I think the first piece of music I ever heard that I really loved was 'Salome's Dances' by Richard Strauss. I played that 12-inch, 78 record, and I stood up on an ottoman to play it on a big Victrola and I'd just keep playing it and playing it.

Music remains the most strange of the materials because we don't understand what happens when music moves you.

I started directing chamber orchestras, then adding bigger pieces, adding winds, adding small symphonies. I've always loved chamber music, and I've done a lot.

Classical music can rock you!

When we're at the end of The Rite of Spring or of a Bruckner symphony, I want people to feel the music physically.

The thing that will never go away is that connection you make with a band or a song where you're moved by the fact that it's real people making music. You make that human connection with a song like 'Let It Be' or 'Long and Winding Road' or a song like 'Bohemian Rhapsody' or 'Roxanne,' any of those songs. They sound like people making music.

Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.

My ex-wife was trying to be nice once, so she took me to a concert in Los Angeles. I went with her to Symphony Hall, and the orchestra was playing. When the show started, the spotlight was sharp on this one man (Andres Segovia) and he had sombrero on and his guitar propped up like this and, oh man ... he was a master ! - I really heard it. That one guitar sounded like a whole orchestra to me.

Sometimes the impact of Mozart's music is so immediate that the vision in the mind remains blurred and incomplete, while the soul seems to be directly invaded, drenched in wave upon wave of melancholy.

A flutist who is moved to tears by his own performance will soon make the listeners laugh because of the sounds that he produces.

Music gets us in touch with our emotions in a way that's more intimate than any other art form.

Sometimes I wish I could walk up to my music as if for the first time, as if I had never heard it before. Being so inescapably a part of it, I'll never know what the listener gets, what the listener feels, and that's too bad.

The piano is the social instrument par excellence... drawing-room furniture, a sign of bourgeois prosperity, the most massive of the devices by which the young are tortured in the name of education and the grown-up in the name of entertainment.

During a rehearsal of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony the members of the orchestra were so overwhelmingly moved by the conducting of Arturo Toscanini that they rose as one man and applauded him. When the spontaneous cheering has subsided, Toscanini turned to his men, tears glistening in his eyes. "Please . . . please! Don't do this! You see, gentlemen, it isn't me you should applaud. It's Beethoven!"

I hate the opera. I think I must have a tin ear. No matter how hard I concentrate it still sounds like a bunch of Italian chefs screaming risotto recipes at each other.

A great song can make you cry and transport you to another dimension.

No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Reethoven's Ninth, Rartok's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Reatles' White Album?

Music is an extremely powerful art medium that can really affect people's emotions. It is amazing to realize how much communities can be born from different kinds of music and the people who appreciate them.

Next to him lay his violin, trampled, an eerily poignant little corpse.

It is music that causes the heart to broaden and the listener to grow cold with ecstasy and fright.

Kind of the critical acclaim of this movie [La La Land] is that it's striking a chord with the public in a way that has been really beautiful and powerful.

Songs like "Spirit Carries On" really gets the audience moved and on the same page. It's challenging and all so much fun to play.

Singing, it's like it's like loving somebody, it's a supreme emotional and physical experience.

If you thought Stairway to Heaven was a long song, dear god you should listen to it played on a lute.