Musical Sophistication Quotes

The Japanese actually approach the music on a high level. It's always been on a high level.

I don't think any of the early Romantic composers knew how to write for the piano... The music of that era is full of empty theatrical gestures, full of exhibitionism, and it has a worldly, hedonistic quality that simply turns me off.

I don't understand why Europeans and South Americans can take more sophistication. Why is it that Americans need to hear their happiness major and their tragedy minor, and as jazzy as they can handle is a seventh chord? Are they not experiencing complex emotions?

However, very recently I have come to an understanding that complex music is not necessarily pleasant.

Piano is very elegant. I also think it's a very truthful instrument.

Mozart combined high formality and playfulness that delights as no other composition in any other medium does.

We've been branded 'the thinking man's hip-hop.' So the music's got to have some level of maturity.

Somalis really are very musically sophisticated, and they're about their own thing.

There's no concession to the fact that Dylan might be a more sophisticated singer than Whitney Houston, that he's probably the most sophisticated singer we've had in a generation. Nobody is identifying our popular singers like a Matisse or Picasso. Dylan's a Picasso - that exuberance, range, and assimilation of the whole history of music.

When I started, I didn't know how to sing in Arabic - it's a very complex and sophisticated music full of codes and modes and quarter-tones.

I've found in composing that being simple and profound—having in-depthness in your music—is the most difficult thing to do. Anybody can write a whole lot of notes, which may or may not say something . . . But why make it complicated for the musicians to play? Why make it difficult for the listeners to hear?

My policy is not how fast you play, it's not how much you play but it's what you play and where you play it ... play for the commercial side of the music ... the word I still use today is called "simplicity" .. it is so important that you use simplicity in your playing and in your music.

Older audiences are hard to win over. They're very specific in their tastes and critical of new music.

I'm not a total chump. I write stuff that's reasonably musically complex.

Bach's music is really some of the greatest. I think, in some ways, Bach is the most profound composer of all.

No birdcall is the musical equal of a clarinet blown with panache.

There are so many ingredients that are contained in 'The Wall' that were not necessarily contained in other Pink Floyd records, particularly following on from 'Animals,' which was very spare and sparse. Production on it was much more massive, the complexity of the recording was much more intense.

After 'City of Evil,' the world was still kind of apprehensive about Avenged Sevenfold. They didn't know if we were a serious band or just some kids trying to play really ambitious music with crazy guitar parts that would be here one minute and gone the next.

There's a higher place that I have no illusions about reaching. There's a sophistication and aesthetic about composers who only write only for the music's sake.

That's why I loved Dinah Washington. She sung jazz, but they called her the Queen of the Blues. She had the control and sophistication of jazz in her note selection and how to attack a song or certain lines, but then attacked it with a painful force of blues behind it. That's why I admired her so much, because of that versatility.

Being a man of taste and sophistication, the 80s were objectively, quantifiably, empirically, diagram-it-on-a-blackboard the worst decade in the history of recorded music.

Give me the artist who breathes it like a native, and goes about his work in it as quietly as a common man goes about his ordinary business. Mozart did so; and that is why I like him. Even if I did not, I should pretend to; for a taste in his music is a mark of caste among musicians, and should be worn, like a tall hat, by the amateur who wishes to pass for a true Brahmin.

Our music is harder to play than it sounds. It's the small details you don't realize are there until you try and re-do it.

We all know that jazz demands a cultivation of the mind.

To my mind and ear, there is simply nothing that compares to the musical sophistication of a late Beethoven, Bartok, Schubert or Brahms work for minimal forces.