I started playing piano when I was eight, and I went on to study piano in school, so I have a background in classical piano and studied composition in school. Writing music came later.
I grew up playing classical violin and a lot of Bach and Mozart and the things that Einstein loved.
Vijaya Dashami is considered to be an auspicious occasion for children to commence their education in classical dance and music, and pay homage to their teachers.
I was exposed to many kinds of music including rock and disco, classical and folk, Midtown and Miles Davis, Sly Stone and David Bowie.
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.
What I do for migraines when I get them, I listen to classical music, and I turn it up really loud.
Many classical musicians lack pulse and rhythmical strength and precision, so for us it was very important to acquire and learn those.
Before I was 5, I did have a lot of time on my hands. I had no job and really no career, and I spent an awful lot of time listening to records. It was more the classical ones, really – Prokofiev, and I think there was some Mozart in there, and more impressionistic composers like Delius.
I don’t think I’ll ever want to do pop music. I think I’ll only ever want to do classical crossover because it’s something that I love, and pop just doesn’t work for me.
Music has always been in my family, but it was mainly keyboards. I learned to play classical piano, but when I first heard the amazing bass guitar of James Jamerson, who played on all the big Motown hits of the ’60s and ’70s, I knew bass guitar was my instrument.
As someone who’s been doing a lot of classical theater recently, I loved the idea of getting to run around in Steven Alan, and not be in a corset and a wig, and not have a dialect, and get to be in a 90-minute play with no intermission, and get to do real comedy.
The more I got into playing guitar, the more I enjoyed music, and the broader my listening became. The instrument itself became important to me, and I started messing around with classical guitar and took classical lessons.
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.
My parents loved classical music. And my father adored Mozart. But for some reason, I always had a reaction against it.
The excitement you can get in classical concert is as big, in a different sense, as you can get when you go to the ice hockey or baseball game.
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.
My husband is a former rocker and in charge of our humungous music collection, and I’ve recently been asking him for classical music.
Television has dried up for my generation, so it’s plays and films. You get used to being lazy doing films, but classical theatre’s going to finish me off.
In movies, the composers and decision makers are different, so we don’t come across classical songs often in films due to lack of interest. The decision makers are non-musical people, so one doesn’t get to hear more classical songs in films.
I was lucky enough to grow up in a house where we listened to all kinds of music. We listened to Haitian, hip hop, soul, classical jazz, gospel and Cuban music, to name a few. When you have access to that as a child, it just opens up your world.
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.
It wasn’t all spent on practicing, I did do other things! but the classical guitar means a lot to me so I spend many hours building good chops and getting a good program together.
I still play jazz, and I’ve always got that trumpet very handy, but I’m coming to feel the classical venues are where my main focus is, in the realm of symphonic pops.
My parents met in music school, and my father was a music professor and conductor. Growing up, we always had classical and contemporary music playing.
‘The Firebird’ just symbolizes a lot for me and my career. It was one of the first really big principal roles that I was ever given an opportunity to dance with American Ballet Theatre, and it was a huge step for the African-American community, I think, within the classical ballet world.
People wanted to do science outside of classical institutions like universities or big corporations, so we embraced it.
I just wanted to go to New York and be on Broadway, but then I was accepted by Juilliard, where they trained me in classical voice. It was great in the end, but at the time, I thought, ‘What am I doing here? This is not my path.’ But it was absolutely my path and where I was meant to be.
Only directors like Sanjay Leela Bhansali, who make period films, have songs in their movies that facilitate the inclusion of classical dance forms. No one else is concentrating on making pure classical numbers.
I really love sort of classical cinema where people were telling stories with very little dialogue, and people were using the camera in a really interesting way.
If you look at the history of music, you have classical composers, church music, pop music, etc. Music that’s existed for centuries. I think there are some songs that are close to immortal. They will last longer than we will in this lifetime.
I still feel like a novice when it comes to classical theater, but I don’t ever want to become comfortable with anything. The greatest creativity comes from being nervous and uncomfortable.
Being a classical musician, you can go to school for it; you can go get a degree. Even as a composer, there is a certain career path you can follow, but becoming a rock musician is a much more elusive career. How do you learn that or do that?
Before I got the desired effect in my voice, I trained in classical music under my father for several years.
I think any classical training in the theatre is of enormous value.
I want to do all kinds of things. I want to do some comedy. I’d love to do a romantic comedy, and I’d love to do some period pieces with classical text. I’d love somebody to cast me as Macbeth, but for a film. I just want to be all over the place.
When I was 20, Shostakovich was my favorite composer. I still find his Fifth Symphony wonderful, with its outstanding themes and rhythms. That’s the piece that made me want to be a classical composer.
A classical work doesn’t ever have to be understood entirely. But those who are educated and who are still educating themselves must desire to learn more and more from it.
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.
Though my poems are about evenly split between traditionally formal work that uses rhyme and meter and classical structure, and work that is freer, I feel that the music of language remains at the core of it all. Sound, rhythm, repetition, compression – these elements of my poetry are also elements of my prose.
We were really interested in music from all over the world. We realized that what we were doing was very close to contemporary classical music because of the lack of tonality in the guitar- the fact that I play guitar the way I play.
I enjoy every role that I do. But I would love to do a dance-based film. It can even be the biopic of a great Indian classical dancer. I want to push boundaries.
When you look at classical structures, they’re often linked to literature, music, or a poem. They were constructed by master builders, which means it’s not something standard that you can copy.
I like to listen the blues and some classical.
I don’t know if it’s a sign of all the chaos that is happening out there or not, but I’ve lately craved the structure and order of classical music, the balance and symmetry.
I’m not really involved with politics… I’m living in my cocoon with my classical music around.
With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order.
I am really very fond of Indian classical music though I have spent my teenage years in Bahrain.
I’ll never be satisfied in classical ballet. It’ll never be good enough. I’ll never be happy with most of my product.
By 1970, the first stirrings of the revolt against Modernist orthodoxy in architecture had been felt, although it would be several years more until Postmodernism was widely accepted and made classical motifs permissible in high-style building design for the first time in decades.
I am not doing something that it is experimental music in relation to classical music.
My training has been in Hindustani classical, and I have done a six-week course in English vocals at Berklee. The holistic learning has helped me a lot.
From the heaviest of the heavy to classical to country, that’s what I listen to, I listen to a variety and I enjoy good music, good songs.
