Stephen Hough Quotes

Debussy is one of the few composers who actually created a new sound on the piano - or perhaps we should say a new smell, so perfumed are the vibrations which emanate from the instrument.

Debussy--A pretty girl with one blue eye and one brown one.

Chopin was a master of melody, harmony and voice leading - the art of smoothly moving from chord to chord.

The impressionists, Debussy, Faure, in France, did take a few steps forward.

I like chords that are very lush with all the lush parts taken out.

I love music. I have a fondness for Chopin, and I very much like his 'Raindrop Prelude.'

I have no doubt that there are great people about though... the thing of it is, nothing to this day moves me like classical music (Debussy, Vaughn Williams).

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

I do not sing nor play, but I adore music, particularly Chopin. I like him because I cannot understand him.

I got obsessed with classical music, I got obsessed with Chopin, with playing the piano.

For ten years, I went to piano lessons. I don't think I'm a very musical person, and the theory quite defeated me, but I had a freak aptitude for Debussy and Ravel.

I have to tell you that J.S. Bach was easily the greatest musical innovator in the history of the world. He was so advanced for his time. There's a spiritual depth to his music. You can listen to it and it's like meditation.

Iconic artists are never straight ahead. Michael Jackson loved Elvis and Burt Bacharach, and uniquely blended both of them into what he did.

If you think of any strange fusion with bachata, most likely, we've done it. It's bachata mixed with different elements. We don't follow any style.

I love listening to things like those wonderful piano pieces of Stockhausen. It's just not my thing as a composer or performer, and thank goodness we're not obliged to be Modernist any more.

Claude Debussy's 'Children's Corner' is a suite with six movements just for piano. Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli and Alfred Cartot's versions are amazing, but my favorite is Menininha Lobo's. Her version was done when she was an old lady - and you can hear it.

I've loved Alfred Cortot's playing from an early age, and I never tire of hearing his recordings, particularly Chopin and Schumann from the 1920s and '30s.

There is no piece of guitar music that has the formal beauty of a piano sonata by Mozart, or the richly worked out ideas and passion of a late Beethoven string quartet, or for that matter the beautiful mellifluous poetry of a Chopin Ballade.

I've never been known as a riff kind of artist.

No two composers were more totally at home in front of the piano than Debussy and Chopin, hands to keys to strings to sound waves to pen and paper in one perfect gesture of inspiration.

Chopin is a great composer who influenced many, many important composers. He was a great innovator, especially in harmony.

Listen to the triple fugue in 'Magnificat' - the first subject is seven voices, the second one has 52 different voices, the third uses five; then I combine all together. Such textures you cannot call primitive.

I remember, for my fifth birthday, Chet Baker sat me on the upright piano, and he played just for me for a few minutes. I can still remember the pressure of the air on my chest. It was my first physical contact with sound.

The first dramatic experience I had of music was when I was five. The electricity had gone out in Georgia, and my mum played the 'Moonlight Sonata' on the piano.

When my dad went to college to get his master's from Loyola, he was playing Debussy and Chopin and Beethoven. But he played all that New Orleans stuff, too. I would go with my dad to gigs, pick up the piano and the speakers, and I would be like his roadie.