Musical Contrasts Quotes

With music, I get to a much darker place. Where I'm able to go with 'Portlandia' has a wider range, but also a brighter range.

Silences between movements are employed only in order to bring the opposing duo to the fore.

I don't like to hurry. I'm not a conductor of the fast, fiery romantic type. I prefer Bruckner, with the sincerity of his musical language and the huge time spans in which his ideas develop, to Mahler, with his hysteria and self-indulgence.

I'm very interested in the distance and the space between those two poles: very concrete, song-based stuff on the one hand and very improvisational, abstract stuff on the other. I don't see any reason music should exclude one or the other, and I think the pairing of them together makes for very interesting music in a lot of ways.

Touring with Yes was generally great fun, and I got on well with the rest of the guys, but we were like chalk and cheese in many respects. I was unique in the band as a card-carrying Conservative.

Burzum is a projection of me or, at the very least, a projection of a side of me, but you can, of course, view Burzum and Varg as separate entities, as you surely can like the first and dislike the other, or vice versa for that sake, but to me, my music will always be a natural part of me.

You can put the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the same category, but the types of music, the colors each band evokes, are completely different. It's the same with Mozart and Beethoven - they express two very different aspects of music.

Megadeth doesn't sound anything like Metallica.

That's the thing that we said about the horn before: it's a focus issue. It's like a singer versus a drummer. If a drummer's playing a drum beat, and a singer starts singing, what do you think the audience is going to do?

Well, you know what? The same people that get driven crazy by hip hop are the same people that probably listen to the type of music that drives me crazy. Like, Journey covers.

I do seem to like to combine the dramatic emotional warmth of strings with the grooves and body business of drums and bass.

A lot of places we go, when they see the organ coming in, they're expecting rock and roll, but after they hear us play they like it. To me, guitar cuts through-it carries more than organ. But organ has got more guts.

I want people to understand balance. I might make a banger, and that's the way that I feel, and then I may want to make a song that's really deep.

My mom and dad have two very different tastes in music, so they were playing everything from Prince to the Beatles to Aaliyah.

For Debussy the musician and the man I have had profound admiration, but by nature I'm different from him. I think I have always personally followed a direction opposed to that of the symbolism of Debussy.

People lump us into the nu-metal category, and there might be a hint of that stuff, but if you really listen to a nu-metal band and then listen to Slipknot, it's so apples and oranges that it's retarded.

When I listen to symphonies, or long pieces of music, there are so many different moods and movements, and things that are really beautiful going to something with a lot of tension.

I do have a way of playing piano where it's very melodic and emotional, but then often it's great if whoever's singing doesn't sing exactly what's in the piano melody, but maybe it's connected in some way.

The Beatles were no trouble... lots of girls. The Stones were black-jacketed guys, a rough crowd. A whole different scene between the Stones' black leather jackets and the Beatles' pretty-dressed girls with the ribbons in their hair, teenagers standing on the seats screaming, nothing broken.

The Third Quartet I made the instruments in pairs - Two different pairs - Violin and viola, and violin and cello. They played very different things from each other all through the whole piece.

When you're up against an electric band like that, it's like you're on two separate planets.

I think, until I was 16, classical music had just seemed like a little bit of a rhythmic wasteland for me. Coming from bluegrass, where one conducts oneself rhythmically, it seemed like such a different approach, and at that point the difference that I was noticing was a real turn off to me.

It was really terrific but Foreigner was nothing like Yes and that style did not suit our music.

For me, anything can be music! I can get huge enjoyment and be moved totally by the purity and perfection of some Renaissance polyphony, but equally I can feel emotion in the expectant hum of a big old guitar amp just before the strings are hit.

A lot of people do not like singer-songwriters, and a lot of people who like them do not like hard rock. It's either-or.