I first started playing the violin at 6. And then at 7, it was piano. So from then it was just classical music like every day.
When I was younger, I used to do that a lot: I would hear a part of a song that would really relax me and then put it on repeat. That would send me to sleep. It was quite obvious classical music, people like Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Erik Satie, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel.
I wouldn’t call myself at all as a crossover artist – I kind of hate that word – but in a way, you need to see me like that, because I’m working in classical music, I’m doing these other projects, and I’m having a rock career at the same time.
I have never learned to read or write music so I am not a virtuoso musician like the others you mentioned. I am completely unable to play like them because I never learned classical music, I just developed my own crazy style!
Before college, I acted in my room, to classical music, because music tells stories. I’d put on a record and proceed, silently. I’d keep putting the needle back to a certain segment because I hadn’t died well enough. I had to really, really feel dead. I’d love to do a death scene.
The world of classical music is so fascinating. It’s a world that encompasses people from everywhere and erases the basic restraints of nationality; everyone is united by this common language of music.
I am a trained singer in Hindustani and classical music.
I don’t think you can mix classical music and reggae. It’s not possible. But some producer in, like, Norway is going to put it together.
I think sometimes when you speak about something like ‘Indian classical music’ and ‘ragas,’ and all of that’s new to people, it can be quite intimidating, in the same way that I have sometimes found opera and Wagner intimidating – one doesn’t know where to begin sometimes.
Indian classical music is charming and currently there are a wide range of musicians who bring great classical tunes to the Bollywood industry.
Maybe I’m genetically more inclined to music – but the music I make is so far removed from Indian classical music. I grew up in Texas!
My mom was an opera singer. She did all the classical music, and I heard it. I know every opera. I know every classical piece of music.
I have an issue with classical music.
One of the things I love about jazz music is that intent is first and execution is second. In classical music, execution is first and intent is second, meaning that you must first learn a piece before you can truly add your interpretation to it.
My musical roots and inspiration lie not in rock n’ roll or metal music, but first and foremost in classical music, balalaika, and in underground house music.
In western classical music with an orchestra, you focus the orchestra on melodies and harmony. In African music, the biggest focus is on rhythms and counter-rhythms – the complexity of rhythms.
Classical music can rock you!
You cannot go wrong by learning classical music because it trains the ear.
I had to listen to the classical music because it calms me down, calms my nerves down.
As people’s lifestyles have improved, they’ve become more and more sensitive toward animals. It’s becoming a universal value, like Western classical music.
I got my interest in Lotte Lenya and the Brecht-Weill canon from my parents. And I love classical music – I got that from my parents. I love Cole Porter – that I got from my dad.
Classical music can be catchy, so can African instrumental guitar music. It’s not just pop songs that are catchy. Rhythms can be catchy, too.
I studied classical music in high school.
I’m saddened to see that everyone’s pitched out the baby with the bath, in that we say that it can’t be one or the other, it could be both. I mean, just because we listen to classical music doesn’t mean that we can’t listen to jazz.
I listen to either romantic classical music, Brahms or Beethoven or something like Mozart, or I go all the way contemporary and listen to Metallica or Adele, Radiohead, jazz, whatever it is that is completely opposite.
I grew up listening to my parents’ albums. Many of them were either classical – Bach, Beethoven and Brahms – or easy listening, like Mantovani. I loved the spectrum of emotions in classical music, from fortissimo to pianissimo. My early passion for classical made my drumming more musical later on.
When I listen to music today, it is about 99 percent classical. I rarely even listen to folk music, the music of my own specialty, because folk music is to me more limited than classical music.
I turned popular music on the radio, and I never listened to it again after that, in about 1985. That’s when I switched over to classical music, and I pretty much stayed with that since then.
My mom loved rock n’ roll. My father hated it. We couldn’t play it when he was around. He liked classical music and Duke Ellington.
Seriously though, my father was the first African American to sign a contract with the Metropolitan Opera so I grew up with classical music and jazz in the home all the time.
I used to watch those rock videos where they would chainsaw the piano. And I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ I thought classical music was corny.
I love classical music. Yes, I was in a conservatory when I was younger and played guitar and all that stuff, so I also love rock.
There is some brilliant pop music and some very poor classical music. And why shouldn’t comedy be treated as seriously as drama?
If I was running a British School of classical music I’d employ Tai Chi teachers to help the conductors at the end of their lessons.
I suppose I am more comfortable with jazz because I have been playing it that much longer, and also because classical music is a much more disciplined genre.
Why a musician loves playing jazz or classical music or what makes them happy, and why an artist likes to paint – it’s so hard to actually put into words what that feeling is of joy that we get, but that is what I get: a feeling of joy when the camera is rolling, even if I’m doing something that is not joyous.
Even in classical music, the cello doesn’t get a lot of respect because the piano and the violin get it all.
So, if I ever find myself hankering for the long, respectful silences of the olden days, I remind myself that classical music broadcasting was a whisker away from becoming one long silence itself.
I had 12 years of classical music as a child, playing piano competitions as a teenager, playing in blues bands and rock ‘n’ roll bands, country and jazz bands. I played in about any situation.
I always used to listen to quite a bit of classical music because my dad liked it, and if you’ve got any ear for music at all you have to enjoy Mozart.
A lot of people ask how I ended up doing classical music given that I’m in a rock band. The truth is that it’s the other way around. I was trained as a classical musician and then started playing in a rock band later.
Many fail to realize this great recording industry was built by so-called jazz artists. And at the other end of the spectrum, a base in European classical music as well.
It was not a secret, then or now, that there is something vaguely un-American about forcing your child to be really good at classical music performance.
For me, personally, the most interesting music comes from the popular sector – from film and pop music – since contemporary classical music got stuck and went into directions where it lost a lot of the public by over-intellectualizing.
Growing up with country, R&B, gospel, and classical music from my grandmother and pop, Tuskegee was the perfect melting pot for my influences as a writer.
I was raised in an Indian household – singing classical music and eating south Indian food. But the second I went to school, it was a different world. I’d be listening to Destiny’s Child, Usher and the Backstreet Boys. It wasn’t until college that I really found the balance between the two worlds.
The tradition of classical music and the opera is such that it used to be the place where social intercourse could take place between all parts of society: politicians, industrialists, artists, citizens, etc. That tradition, I think, still exists, but it’s much, much more diluted.
It is so important for people at a young age to be invited to embrace classical music and opera.
My mom had this romantic notion of her children playing classical music. The idea is you learn it when you’re still learning language. It’s using the same part of the brain.
Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.
I’m sure there are a few things in my CD collection that might surprise people. I like classical music, the blues, and I’m a big fan of alternative rock.
When I need some energy in the morning I can put a metal CD in my player, because it gets me going! Classical music will send me off the road!
Western classical music had long known syncopation. But no one had felt compelled to snap his fingers to music before American jazz and musical theater, which sent a previously undiscovered current coursing through the body, demanding outlet.
I was raised with a lot of classical music. I loved ballet. I was a bun head for 10 years.
My father knew classical music very well. Driving in the car, listening to the radio, he could name every composer, every movement, what piece it was. I was fascinated by the way he recognized who wrote what.
