My dad sung and played piano. But he was also a man of God. He was a minister. So when Sam Cooke would come in town, you know, with The Soul Stirrers at that time, he was singing gospel, they would end up at my dad’s church, and it would always be a guest singer for Sunday morning.
The hierarchy is set out for me. The first priority is piano. I have to be 101 percent prepared. I find that at other times of the day, if the creative juices are working, I might want to write or compose.
I totally related to Cole Porter’s magnetic pull to any piano that was in the room, which he was famous for doing, as was Gershwin. You couldn’t drag them away from a piano.
I’m definitely conscious of time. I already waste so much of it, just on a flight. I look back to when I was 13, and I wish I had stuck with my piano studies.
As for my own music, I’ve never written a book about it. I’m not pedagogical… When I write an abstract piano sonata or a concerto, I write what I feel. I’m not a self-conscious composer.
My dad played a little bit of piano and guitar, but not that professionally. I saw him play, and I said, ‘I want to play. I want to try this instrument.’
My place in London is very small, so a piano would take up a third of the room. I leave home in the morning when I’m there and go to my studio. I close the door, and it’s soundproof. There’s no phone or TV or computer, and I can work uninterruptedly. That has been a huge advantage over the years.
I am so happy that I didn’t go to school and I didn’t have anyone to tell me how to position my fingers on the piano correctly.
I think any parent that makes their kid sit at a piano against their will and practice, they’re going to have a kid that’s not going to want to play the piano.
I was born in love with music. My mother is a singer. Many of my aunts and uncles on my mother’s side are musical. My grandparents sang and played blues piano. It’s literally in my blood.
Pianos – if they don’t like what you’re saying, then they won’t talk back to you. And you want it to talk back to you.
My mother had a lot of parties when I was a child. There’d always be a moment when she would place me on the upright piano and have me sing Somewhere ‘Over the Rainbow’.
My brother Carl taught me how to play bass. I’m a self-taught keyboard player, though – I figured out our harmonies at the piano.
I started piano when I was four. My mom taught me. And then I went to Manhattan School of Music during high school, like every Saturday. And then I went to Berklee for college, in Boston.
In France the music schools are a bit old fashioned. I was more excited about doing my own stuff or to play with my friend in my band, than studying the piano.
I prepared five songs, I sang them, and he hired me. I started working about a month later at the piano bar.
I think having musical training as a child was really, really important. I studied piano as a child. Piano is a great instrument to understand musical theory on. I think I have that in my brain somewhere.
I sit down and create atmospheres, start playing guitar or piano and just sing whatever comes out of my mouth.
I started taking piano lessons when I was about 5, and there was always a lot of music in my family: my parents both play instruments, my grandparents were classical violinists, and my grandfather was actually a music professor and a conductor.
Piano playing is a dying art. I love the fact that I can be one guy with one instrument evoking an emotional and musical experience.
Anyone who writes knows that ultimately the majority of your time is spent alone in a room with a piano or a guitar, no matter what the project is.
The first music-learning thing that I took seriously was piano lessons when I was a kid. I guess that was probably the only time that I was forced to perform music, because I had piano recitals, and my school also had mandatory music classes that had some performing required.
You wouldn’t expect a cattle dealer to sit down at a grand piano and play it beautifully. That’s my father.
I write my own music. By myself, on a computer, I program guitar and piano.
There was always a piano in the house when I was growing up – my dad played, and I thought it was cool – and when I was eight, I begged my parents to let me have lessons. After a couple of weeks, I wanted to give up, but my parents were very focused and made me keep going, which I’m very pleased about now.
I can’t play guitar or piano. I can’t even play dumb to get through TSA in the airport.
I grew up taking piano lessons and liking Wagner when I was in second grade.
So I guess I had, I think they tell me I had, about three years total of piano lessons, off and on.
When John said that he wanted me to play with him on piano, I told him that there were many others who were qualified. He said, ‘I want you there because you can do it.’
I play piano and ukulele, and I taught myself those things just because I wanted to play them.
I’ve been playing piano since I was 7. I took 15 years of lessons. I’ve got a lot of miles on these hands.
I’m trying to learn classical piano, Mozart and Beethoven and stuff. I took lessons when I was younger and now I sort of sight read the music and play it by ear. It’s fun. It takes up a lot of time. I practice a couple of hours a day, but I find it soothing.
It is surprising how many people who don’t read believe they have a book in them. Why? Nobody would imagine that Alfred Brendel took up the piano on a whim at 25 when he found accountancy unpleasant.
I never went out to make the music that people would like. I mean, I tried, because every teenager tries to do that. But in my heart, I’d always come from gigs where I played upbeat guitar covers and I’d start writing sad songs on the piano.
I love working on a typewriter – the rhythm, the sound; it’s like playing the piano, which I do, too.
It’s funny, I guess when I was growing up, I didn’t really think about being an instrumentalist, per se. I didn’t think, well, I want to be a piano player, or, I want to be a guitar player, or even, I want to be a singer. I just wanted to be a musician.
I’m very quiet. In the beginning, my brother would play the piano, and I would sing, because that’s what my mom and dad did. And then along the way, somebody teased me for even thinking that I could get up there. That stayed with me, and I became very shy.
‘The Piano Lesson’ is very sophisticated, easily the most adult or complex material I’ve attempted. It’s the first film I’ve written that has a proper story, and it was a big struggle for me to write. It meant I had to admit the power of narrative.
I did it all, singing, the harp, piano. But I was so shy, I’d wake up at six to practice piano because I didn’t want anyone to hear me play. But then I’d do a big show in school where everyone would see me, and that was actually alright.
I know melody. I know rhythm; I know bass guitar; I know the piano. I know everything about music that helps build the music that go along with creating the whole art form, you know what I’m saying?
From the time I could play the piano, I remember trying to write tunes. They were in my head, and I would just sit down and start noodling. Next thing I knew, I had written a melody.
Kylie and I were both taking piano lessons at the time and didn’t think of acting. A friend rang mum up and said, ‘How about bringing Kylie and Danielle in because they might be right for the part?’
I was two and a half when I first climbed up and sat at a piano.
Yeah, I don’t like, um, I’m not interested in rock ‘n’ roll piano. I find it a little grating.
My dad was the district attorney of New Orleans for about 30 years. And when he opened his campaign headquarters back in the early ’70s, when I was 5 years old, my mother wanted me to play the national anthem. And they got an upright piano on the back of a flatbed truck and I played it.
I tour with a piano, actually. Luckily I am able to hire people that deal with it completely and magically a piano appears on stage and then magically disappears when I leave.
If I hadn’t been President of the United States, I probably would have ended up a piano player in a bawdy house.
I wanted to play the piano.
Well, I would say that music just happens with me, I’m not in the driver’s seat when I am at the piano, the piano is.
Once you’ve experienced the warmth of an audience, the achievement of getting your first laugh, and entertaining them, singing or playing piano, it just keeps it all going.
I hate playing the piano! And it’s so hard to fight for Beethoven’s soul! But that’s what I have to do!
So the ideology was that: use sounds as instruments, as sounds on tape, without the causality. It was no longer a clarinet or a spring or a piano, but a sound with a form, a development, a life of its own.
Love is a piano dropped from a fourth story window, and you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
When I was young, I played the piano and studied classical music and jazz. I wanted to be a concert pianist, and if I’d devoted myself to it, I could have been. But it would have been too much work and a very lonely life.
Every time I see a piano, I have this urge to play it.
But when I first fell in love with the piano, I knew it was me. I was dying to play.
I was such a lazy teenager: I didn’t read or play the piano beyond the bare minimum.
