Renaissance Music Quotes

Obviously classical music tends to be stuff that is usually at least a hundred years old.

Very old music is, like, 11th century in my mind. That's very old.

When I began playing the lute, in 1950 there were not too many lutenists around. I had to work hard, writing out music in museums and libraries. It was before the days of photocopying. And I had just picked up the lute, adapted my guitar technique to it and went from there.

My tastes went all over the place, from Strauss to Mahler. I was never a big Wagner or Tchaikovsky fan. Benjamin Britten, Tallis, all the early English Medieval music, Prokofiev, some Russian composers, mostly the people that were the colorists, the French.

I personally am into the minstrel technique - if I hear someone playing a lute or playing a crumhorn, it just moves me. I don't know why.

Gesualdo was very important to me, I wanted to do something which corresponded to him.

Classical music is a wonderful 1200 year-old tradition that witnesses everything that it has meant and what it means right now to be human.

There's always been a slight twinge of some classical elements in our music.

If you learn classical guitar, you play Bach, and then John Dowland. He's the greatest. He's interesting for many, many reasons.

I'm very moved by Renaissance music, but I still love to play hard rock - though only if it's sophisticated and has some thought behind it.

I was passionately interested in Elizabethan history at school, so it was natural for me as a musician to take interest in the music of that period.

It is difficult to understand the fortunes of an instrument. There was music written for the guitar until the mid-19th century. Then the instrument declined in popularity.

Singing together is something human beings just do, and there are hundreds of years worth of just European vocal music available to read and hear.

I love Bach, I love Beethoven, I love Mozart, I love the Beatles, I love you know, Stockhausen, I love many things. But for some reason I come back to Elizabethan music because it's a little bit like the Beatles.

I suppose that when I started to play the lute it was fairly esoteric.

Strangely, the thing I listen to 75% of the time, when I'm exercising with my headphones on is English Tudor/Elizabethan music, so music from about 1450 to the early 1600's.

I am always connected with the Renaissance a lot; that's why I am connected with Pitti Palace.

I want to write orchestral music. I want to get a group of singers together and sing William Byrd songs.

When I was young, I was interested in Renaissance art.

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.

There's a humble beauty about listening to period instruments that I like.

There's a part of my heart that forever has Anne Boleyn written on it, who I played in 'The Tudors.'

Anybody who thinks the lute just came out of a vacuum doesn't know the history.

Never have so many recordings of the great Masses and motets been in wider circulation.

I am a classical music lover - not necessarily the contemporary stuff, but the old stuff.