Chopin was a master of melody, harmony and voice leading - the art of smoothly moving from chord to chord.
Getting drunk was good. I decided that I would always like getting drunk. It took away the obvious and maybe if you could get away from the obvious often enough, you wouldn't become so obvious yourself.
Has it struck you that the music which is regarded as the most sublime in western civilization, which is the music of Bach, is called baroque?
If you want to be considered a poet, you will have to show mastery of the petrarchan sonnet form or the sestina. Your musical efforts must begin with well-formed fugues. There is no substitute for craft... Art begins with craft, and there is no art until craft has been mastered.
I enjoy practicing law too much to even contemplate retiring, but I often think about engaging in serious study of the history of art, of the intricacies of classical music. I could write a fugue, or perhaps learn to play the cello.
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.
The prophesying business is like writing fugues; it is fatal to every one save the man of absolute genius.
Study Bach. There you will find everything.
There's always been a slight twinge of some classical elements in our music.
I like - I actually love classical music very much.
I listen mostly to classical music.
Composers most identified with the chamber music form are Corelli, Vivaldi, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and, of course, Bach. Of course, Bach. If there is any one composer who gives us reason and emotion, it is Bach.
I played a lot of Bach's partitas and sonatas; I like the way that Bach was abstracting already from these dance forms.
I play a lot of classical music around the house.
It's like a fugue of evaded responsibility.
I love gentle, gorgeous classical music such as Mozart.
In Bach there is still too much crude Christianity, crude Germanism, crude scholasticism; he stands on the threshold of European (modern) music, but he looks back from there to the Middle Ages.
I used to love Bach.
The history of knowledge is a great fugue in which the voices of the nations one after the other emerge.
Classical music presents some of the world's most challenging pieces.
Bach was a top harmonist geezer, which is why the jazz cats love him.
In my own life I studied music, not creative writing; I see a novel as music - an opening as an overture, themes and subplots as lines in a fugue. The chance to write a novel about a musician boxed in by all kinds of limitations but who plays out his ultimate struggle for freedom at the piano was irresistible.
I'm a fan of many different styles of classical and symphonic music.
Composers in the old days used to keep strictly to the base of the theme, as their real subject. Beethoven varies the melody, harmony and rhythms so beautifully.
Classical music can rock you!
