Top 35 Quartet Quotes

A good quartet is like a good conversation among friends interacting to each other’s ideas.

Santa Monica, where I have always lived, is not a town where you will find storefront Church of God in Christ churches. So, the whole idea of gospel quartet singing is something I never knew existed until I began to hear it on record.

I do know that on my mom’s side, my uncle sang and had a gospel group. He also had a radio show he would do on Sundays with his quartet.

Industry, economy, honesty, and kindness form a quartet of virtues that will never be improved upon.

I didn’t have to inspire John toward the avant-garde; he did not need anything from me. That is why it’s so interesting that critics decided to dislike me. At some point the members of the quartet felt it was time for a change, and left on their own.

The Detroit String Quartet played Brahms last night. Brahms lost.

My dad used to sing in a quartet. He loved everything: adult contemporary, anything smooth. He’d listen to the quartets.

Charlie Christian played amplified guitar with Benny Goodman’s quartet. He was the greatest guitar player that ever was. But he never looked up from the guitar. But I put a little dance to it. They appreciate seein’ something along with hearin’ something.

I love working with the quartet. I have more freedom and flexibility.

Every small town has its dramatic group, its barber-shop quartet, every home has music in one form or another.

I prefer a quartet, it makes everyone work harder.

Whether it’s performing a concert with my quartet or sitting in with my peers, enjoying musical conversations at home with my brothers or hanging and playing choro with my friends – sharing moments in that bright space of music are the happiest times.

And over the last ten years, after my work with the Brodsky Quartet, I had the opportunity to write arrangements for chamber group, chamber orchestra, jazz orchestra, symphony orchestra even.

I owe very, very much to Mozart; and if one studies, for instance, the way in which I write for string quartet, then one cannot deny that I have learned this directly from Mozart. And I am proud of it!

I know of musicians who have played together for decades who hate each other. The Modern Jazz Quartet for one.

I have learned a lot from jazz. I compare good acting to jazz music. The more you study and prepare as an actor, the more equipped you are to live in the moment. Just like the gifted musicians in my dad’s quartet, it takes a courageous actor to be free.

We used to get on planes, and they’d ask who we were, and we’d say, ‘The Dave Brubeck Quartet’, and they’d say, ‘Who?’ In later years they’d say, ‘Oh’, which amounts to the same thing.

When I heard Monk in person in 1955, he was playing with a quartet in a small club. The place was full of musicians, but there was no public at all.

‘Iceman’ covers a bigger scope than ‘Long Day’s Journey.’ But they’re both fabulous pieces of work. ‘Iceman’ is like a symphony. It’s got all the movements, all these different voices. ‘Long Day’s Journey’ is more like a beautiful string quartet.

I’ll tell you what I would do in a shot if I could. I would sing in the barbershop quartet in The Music Man.

Some tracks are with quartet and some tracks are with synthesizer.

One is that you have to take time, lots of time, to let an idea grow from within. The second is that when you sign on to something, there will be issues of trust, deep trust, the way the members of a string quartet have to trust one another.

I approach everything as chamber music. Even with Beethoven symphonies, I lead from the violin and basically encourage the orchestra to think of it as a giant string quartet.

My grandma is very musical and can play piano by ear, and my grandpa was in a quartet in Kentucky.

My grandmother would sing in the choir, while my dad – while he was in college – sang and recorded with a quartet. So yeah, it was definitely my dad’s Southern side that impacted on me musically.

My grandfather was in a barbershop quartet and my grandmother was in a gospel quartet with her sisters.

The most perfect expression of human behavior is a string quartet.

In our local Baptist church, I sang in the choir and formed a gospel quartet. When our minister caught me messing with his guitar, he taught me three positions – one, four and five. After that, I taught myself to play.

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 I’m scoring something like a string quartet, it’s all notated music, so it’s meticulously written in the score, which is very different than doing things by ear.

‘Shantaram’ is the second in the series of a quartet of novels that I have planned about my life but is the first to be written. The third book is a sequel to ‘Shantaram,’ the first a prequel.

There is no piece of guitar music that has the formal beauty of a piano sonata by Mozart, or the richly worked out ideas and passion of a late Beethoven string quartet, or for that matter the beautiful mellifluous poetry of a Chopin Ballade.

I first read the ‘Raj Quartet’ in the early 1970s, when Paul Scott’s decision to set his novels in the dying days of the British Raj in India seemed an eccentric choice, almost as though he did not want readers. The British were tired of their imperial past.

How could a New Yorker possibly take something called the Hollywood String Quartet seriously?

You hear it in your brain. Whatever makes sense. Some songs work well as quartet songs, sometimes they don’t.