Top 70 Joshua Bell Quotes

Great music was written by the great geniuses, and you want to do it justice.

My whole life, I’ve been watching conductors. I was 7 the first time I played with a conductor. Seeing the ones that do it well, it’s an amazing thing.

It’s very hard to find a pianist that’s willing to play the so-called accompanist role on part of the program and yet be capable of being a great solo pianist that you would want for the big sonatas.

As my career has gone on, I guess I’ve become more well known. I’m playing to fuller halls in general, which is a nice feeling. When you’re doing that, you’re going to have a certain number of people who are not just the hardcore classical fanatics, and this makes me very happy.

I’m happy if my music is being downloaded, whether it’s legally or illegally.

You might think that after 40 years of practice you wouldn’t need to practice anymore, but sadly it doesn’t work that way. You still have to keep chugging away and perfecting.

The best way to refine an interpretation is by getting out and performing.

The great secret is that an orchestra can actually play without a conductor at all. Of course, a great conductor will have a concept and will help them play together and unify them. But there are conductors that actually inhibit the players from playing with each other properly.

So much of performing is a mind game. You’re memorizing thousands of notes, and if you start thinking about it in the wrong way, everything can blow up in your face.

What drew me to the violin was mastering the instrument technically, which I’m continuing to do. You want to push boundaries, to not always be in your comfort zone. If you don’t, you get stale. So you have to find areas of growth.

I grew up in a musical family, but nobody was a professional musician.

You’re a constant student, as a musician.

Music teaches people to work together, which is maybe one of the most important skills.

Someone who directs a film, they have to see the overall picture, and they have to get the best performances out of the actors.

My father was – actually was an Episcopal priest as a young man. Became a psychotherapist, a psychologist. My mother is Jewish, so I grew up in a mixed background. But the common denominator was certainly music, and that was sort of emphasized in my household as music being sort of the spiritual force.

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.

We live in the least ugly time in history.

We like to categorize things into showy things and deep things, you know, and things that are high music – important music – and shallow music. And I think that’s dangerous, because there’s often a mix of both.

Beethoven’s symphonies are not ‘relaxing.’ They are the most exciting things that have ever been created by a human being.

I think – I’m always interested in reaching people in different ways, not by – not by just standing on a – randomly on a subway platform.

When Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony was premiered, after the second movement, they clapped so much that they had the repeat the second movement and do it again.

There’s nothing more frustrating than seeing a conductor say, ‘Play softer,’ as they’re waving their hands in huge gestures.

Music is a continual learning process. One finds new insights all the time. For me, it began at a very early age; from the beginning, there was something besides the notes.

The symphonies are the things that, as a soloist, I’ve not gotten to play. I used to travel the world playing concertos, and then I would sit and listen to the symphony.

Music is such an incredible tool for kids in general. They learn discipline; they learn how to express themselves. You learn math. You learn language. It’s the ideal teaching tool, and that’s why it’s mind-boggling when any school superintendent decides that music is something we can kind of do without.

After every concert, I greet young people in the lobbies. And I see a huge surge of young people playing music.

Everyone’s definition of what God means can vary. But music is something that really takes you to that – ‘sublime’ is a great word. That thing that is greater than we are. The beauty, the magic of the universe.

The man on the street, he knows who Beethoven is, he knows who Mozart is.

Anyone who knows classical music and loves classical music has heard the Beethoven Seventh hundreds of times probably in their life.

When you start reading a piece together, you get a sense of someone’s basic philosophy of music without saying a word. You realize the other person’s approach, how they express themselves, the kind of restraint they show, all those things.

Although I hardly ever turn on the TV set unless it’s football season, I do watch a lot of TV on my iPad – perfect for long airplane journeys.

I think music should be the basis of an education, not just something you do once a week.

The orchestra confides in me about their music director or their conductor, and I’ve never seen a conductor that’s been liked by everyone.

You don’t have to have lots of love affairs to know what love is.

For me, I’m sort of a wanna-be composer, and I love being involved with the arrangements.

People wrote the most beautiful things during the ugliest times.

Hamburgers are my favorite thing to eat, period.

We live in a very chaotic world that sometimes we – it just seems like a mess. One of the reasons why we listen to music, and to great classical music in particular, is that everything is in an order and in a place and has a beauty that you see in nature, that you see and that people look for when they look for God.

When you play for ticket-holders, you are already validated. I have no sense that I need to be accepted. I’m already accepted.

I use Facebook quite a lot to keep up with my friends, although I had to delete ‘Words With Friends’ from my phone because it was wasting too much of my time.

When you play a violin piece, you are a storyteller, and you’re telling a story.

I like working with kids because I enjoy seeing the looks on their faces and, it’s kind of selfish, I want a future audience.

I want to do everything. That’s my problem. Life is short, and I hate the idea of turning down anything. You never know what interesting experience might happen.

The real architecture happens within the works themselves, and that was done by the composer. That’s where the real skill is. In putting together a program, you’re more a curator, but that’s important as well. And then the interpreting of it is where our big job is.

No one tells you what to do if you completely flop at the beginning of a performance.

So much of performing is a mind game.

I was lucky enough to have parents who started me on music very early, but most kids don’t get that kind of exposure.

I love the outdoor festival feeling.

I’m in a position where, theoretically, I could play the same ten concertos and make a very good living bouncing around playing Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky and Barber, but I really think artists should keep pushing limits and trying new things.

Criticism is always hard to take – we musicians are sensitive. It’s always hard when someone says something negative – but you try to learn to just let it roll off and not worry about it.

In those projects with Sting and Josh Groban and people like that, I see a very interesting effect: their fans coming to my classical concerts, people who’ve never been to a classical show at all.

I do basically what a conductor does with a baton, except I also play along with the orchestra. So I have to juggle the roles of playing the concertmaster; sometimes I drop the violin and wave my arms.

It’s been very exciting for me to start directing and conducting, exploring the symphonic repertoire, which I’ve always loved.

I think it’s really important to always kind of stretch your boundaries and your limits and get out of your comfort zone. And for me, that’s very important.

I learned early on how to make best use of my time. You know, quality is more important than quantity when it comes to practice time. And unfortunately, I still need to practice a lot.

It’s interesting about classical music that the more you hear something, the more you get to know a piece, the better and better it gets, period, which is just an interesting thing on it.

I never had any real expectations about what sort of success I would have or all the publicity.

Conducting is a strange thing to teach.

As far as doing TV, I do think there’s a big audience out there that could enjoy classical music, but they don’t know how to find it, and sometimes by doing different things… crossover things probably make up about 5% of what I do.

Art and music is part of what it means to be a human being. And if you’re neglecting that, you’re basically ignoring a huge side of the brain and a huge side of what it means to be human.

As far as I’m concerned, the stakes are always very high. Whether it’s playing at the White House or playing for a group in my own house – you know, one of those soirees I play in. Once I start playing, the stakes are somehow higher, in a way, than any of the context.

Playing the Beethoven symphonies, for example, is a consummate experience for a musician because Beethoven speaks so directly to who we are as people.