Joshua Bell Quotes

Music is a lens through which to see who we are. Every phrase of every piece of music is trying to tell a story.

For me it's the instrument. If I want to think of a flute and the state of the arts I hear a vibrato; I don't know what a flute is unless the person plays it for me.

I try to tell a story musically in a song.

I find that albums generally tell a story. Because it's music, it doesn't have to be in chronological order.

And I like to interpret music. So I think it's all interpretive.

Music is its own language - if you don't speak it, it's hard to say what you're trying to do.

I love classical music and have been playing violin since I was seven. Music helps me to express feelings in a way words often cannot.

All music has to speak in some form or other.

Is it not the business of the conductor to convey to the public in its dramatic form the central idea of a composition; and how can he convey that idea successfully if he does not enter heart and soul into the life of the music and the tale it unfolds?

I wanted to play my violin and have my musical expression through the instrument. But then I was really young when I had my first opportunity to conduct.

I sing in many different colors and, hopefully, they add up to a great performance that, after you leave the theater, makes you feel like I've really shared something of myself.

The way to do it is to put as much life into the song as I can. You can either get it to breathe or you can't.

With few exceptions, music has been for some centuries the art which has devoted itself not to the reproduction of natural phenomena, but rather to the expression of the artist's soul, in musical sound.

I hear music as narrative.

Music has its own emotional embodiment. It carries an emotion with it. When you associate a lyric with the music, it's much easier; but when you're standing there completely dry in front of the camera with no musical background, just a fine-tuned, get-this-emotional-story across, it's a very, very intense kind of focus.

If you only do little clusters - three or four songs by one, and another, and then yet another - you lose the opportunity to think your way into the composer's mind, since, after all, most of these pieces are quite brief.

I wish myself to be a prop, if anything, for my songs. I want to be the vehicle for my songs. I would like to colour the material with as much visual expression as is necessary for that song.

I'd love to do something where I played a musician.

The blues tells a story in itself. It can make you happy or give you a feeling to swing.

Music does not carry you along. You have to carry it along strictly by your ability to really just focus on that little small kernel of emotion or story.

The negative is the equivalent of the composer's score, and the print the performance.

I think of a piece of music as something that comes alive when it is being performed, and I feel that my role in the transmission of music is to be its best advocate at that moment.

I'm always imagining some sort of story behind the song, even the ones I haven't written. I'm actively engaging in playacting.

I mean, if you decided to go out today and get you an instrument and do whatever it is that you do, no one can tell you how you're going to do it but when you do it.

When I play the trumpet, I'm in a different character.