I started playing music when I was about six and didn’t discover Indian classical music until I was fifteen. So, essentially, I had a lot of catching up to do.
In the ballet studio, it was such an organized and disciplined environment, like I’d never had in my life. Seeing myself in the mirror, surrounded by the classical music, that’s when I started to fall in love with dance.
Influences at home, including classical music, were not all specifically jazz, but the family radio was always on… So there was always some connection to American culture, to American music.
My parents were decent, aspirant first-generation middle class. They read ‘Reader’s Digest’, listened to classical music; my grandparents had a bust of Stalin on the mantelpiece. The kids of that generation were terrified of being below par, class-wise.
I’m very flower-like. I love classical music. I go to ballet and I cry. There’s nothing so beautiful.
Until I was around 12 or 13, I only listened to classical music, mostly Tchaikovsky. But around that age, I started listening to Iron Maiden, and that’s when I purchased my first guitar, a pearl-white Westone.
I went to a music academy in Los Angeles, and some friends started playing me Ravel and Prokofiev, who I liked, but what really blew me away was ‘The Rite of Spring.’ That’s what made me get interested in classical music for real and want to study it.
As far as I was concerned the important thing was that the music was getting the attention as well as me so it was always a great way to get more of the public to connect with classical music, and opera particularly.
Classical music only really came into my life in 1969. I wish I had heard classical music and church music when I was a teenager or even as a child.
But those musics do not address the larger kind of architecture in time that classical music does, whatever each one of us knows that classical music must mean.
I started making music with my band in the ’80s, so I am more product of post punk than classical music, and I have always carried on this way.
I didn’t grow up with classical music. My father was a folk music singer.
In the U.K., classical music is composed by individuals and written down. Indian music is based on certain sequences called ragas. When I perform live, 95% of the music is improvised: it never sounds the same twice.
I used to like to set different film clips to classical music, not even my own songs, but make little movies.
I heard Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, and that was it. I didn’t ever want to be anything else. I just started banging away and semi-studied classical music at the Royal Academy of Music but sort of half-heartedly.
Listening to classical music is like reading philosophy books. Not everybody has to do it.
Before I got the desired effect in my voice, I trained in classical music under my father for several years.
I would have to say I might do some stuff, but it’s the film that’s appealing. I was raised on film. My musical experience is all via film, it’s not from classical music.
I was able to turn to classical music many people, who saw my programs live and on YouTube, and this is one of the nicest achievements I can have.
I would not want the limitations held by the name of a classical musician. I want many people to enjoy my music much beyond just classical music fans. I think the term, ‘violinist,’ keeps me distant from the audience. I want to communicate with them more.
I was surrounded by classical music, art and ballet all these things. But they also had a football field and it was at the conservatoire I decided to be a footballer.
Why English music is being taught in some schools? The government should make arrangements to promote Indian classical music among students.
There should be no boundaries in your relationship with sound. Often it’s not about the music itself but the context in which you hear the music. For instance, listening to a piece of classical music in a film you love often changes your perception of it entirely.
I grew up as a dancer, and music and dance are so closely tied that in ballet class, you’re listening to all this classical music, and in modern class, you’re working with a live drummer. It was something that always made me feel really comfortable, and I’ve had a connection to since the beginning.
I think classical dance is not seeing the evolution seen by classical music.
I was not born into the world of the stuntman and the daredevil; I was born into the world of theater and writing and sculpting and classical music.
My family were all into classical music, and I found that very intimidating.
Because in classical music cello is not regarded as a popular choice, it’s always playing the long, boring notes.
I grew up listening to a lot of classic jazz, and stuff like The Beatles, and old Motown stuff, and a lot of classical music. I just loved all of that.
I also have a big love of classical music played on piano because this is the environment I grew up in my brother being one of the great masters in this world.
It falls in all the cracks, from classical music to jazz,. Anywhere there’s a hole in the floor, my music falls through it. But that’s OK.
I have such an eclectic taste. I like listening to classical music and pop music.
I love classical music and often listen to symphonies or opera in the morning.
It’s not that people don’t like classical music. It’s that they don’t have the chance to understand and to experience it.
I enjoy listening to classical music and heavy metal. I play basketball and try to go diving at least once a year. I don’t really have hobbies in the traditional sense… I engage in too many activities already through the actions of my characters.
What is classical music if not the epitome of sensuality, passion, and understated erotica that popular music, even with all of its energy and life, cannot even begin to touch?
I do not think classical music faces any threat because new music is being made through computer, as the real charm of classical is its purity, and one who is seeking purity will surely find classical music in spite of so many alternatives.
I am a classical music lover – not necessarily the contemporary stuff, but the old stuff.
I was part of a very uncool group. It was a group that liked classical music. They were known as the Music School Gang or, less charitably, the Poof Gang.
I abhor the words ‘classical music.’ Few things satisfy me more than a really good cover version.
One of the problems that we face through the media attention that these artists receive is that there has been an awful lot of talk about opera and classical music being elite and being for an elitist group.
Although cover notes for classical music albums tend to say that the trill of flutes suggests mountain streams and so on, I don’t think anybody listens to music with the expectation that they’re going to be presented with a sort of landscape painting.
I am not doing something that it is experimental music in relation to classical music.
It wasn’t until I found my tribe of artists – people who were outspoken and not afraid to say what they thought, whether in a song or a dance or a piece of classical music – that I found a refuge.
The Zombies were really unique – they had elements of jazz and classical music in their songs and songwriting. They had a very, very different sound compared to a lot of their contemporaries at the time.
There is nothing else is India which is as popular as Bollywood. Look at Indian classical music, how big and how respected it is in the West, but here in India, no one is interested.
Anyone who knows classical music and loves classical music has heard the Beethoven Seventh hundreds of times probably in their life.
I studied classical music for a long time, maybe 10 years, and I realized finally I was never going to have the hands to play that stuff.
As a kid, I loved classical music. Composers like Beethoven were like rock stars to me. Then there were the real rock stars: The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, and Bob Dylan.
I was just moving around the globe, learning classical music and generally doing nothing. I was completely away from glitz and glamour and did not miss it at all.
At the age when Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry, I was listening to European classical music.
There is a reactionary conservative side of classical music, which is not the most exciting side of it. The side that draws me in, there’s a real encouragement of risk-taking, going back to masters of that tradition like Beethoven and Bartok and Stravinsky.
I have a great liking for the Chamba folk music, which depicts the beauty of women and the mountains with a touch of Indian classical music.
I loved ‘Fantasia’ as a kid because it filled me with wonder, enchantment and awe. It was my first real introduction into classical music. It was totally inspiring to me.
I think there are people who use classical music to say, ‘I am better than you, because I know all the rules and you don’t.’ You’re not allowed to have fun or entertain.
Both of my mom’s parents were music teachers, so I got a lot of knowledge about everything from classical music to jazz to musicals.
My mother was an opera singer and my grandmother a concert pianist, and they only liked classical music. If I put on a pop record, they would tell me to turn it off, so I only listen to classical.
