Top 181 Classical Music Quotes

I have loads of issues with the way classical music is presented. It has been too reverential, too ‘high art’ – if you’re not in the club, they’re not going to let you join. It’s like The Turin Shroud: don’t touch it because it might fall apart.

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.

I love singing jazz. I don’t like the idea that classical music should be over here and jazz should be someplace else. It’s all wonderful, and we should be open to enjoying it all.

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.

Classical music in Venezuela is now something like a pop concert. You can see people screaming or crying because they don’t have a ticket.

Classical music only really came into my life in 1969. I wish I had heard classical music and church music when I was a teenager or even as a child.

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.

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.

Ilaignan,’ the script of which has been penned by Chief Minister M Karunanidhi, is a period film that is set in the romantic era of classical music. You will find Western classical music mixed with our Indian melodies.

I’ve got this diverse education, growing up in classical music and existing between that and music that is more visceral, so for sure, I’ve always been interested in music from other cultures.

There is this tremendous amount of arrogance and hubris, where somebody can look at something for five minutes and dismiss it. Whether you talk about gaming or 20th century classical music, you can’t do it in five minutes. You can’t listen to ‘The Rite of Spring’ once and understand what Stravinsky was all about.

We have to go and show these people what classical music is. We say sometimes that classical music has a small audience, but it’s because people don’t have the chance to be closer to it.

I had been exposed to classical music my whole life; even before I was born.

Popularity gets up people’s noses. But I understand the importance and the function of popular music. There is an artistic purpose. Popular music helps people to develop a curiosity and leads them towards classical music.

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!

I was introduced to classical music by my grandparents – my parents were mostly into folk and jazz. Even as a young man, I was literally unaware of the distinctions between any of that, and I still think it’s pointless.

I got obsessed with classical music, I got obsessed with Chopin, with playing the piano.

Europe in general is a great place for me, but specifically Germany has been very good to me. Germans love classical music… Electronic dance music is massive over there, so I’m kind of the marriage between the two.

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.

For me, electronic music is the classical music of the 21st century.

Although cover notes for classical music albums tend to say that the trill of flutes suggests mountain streams and so on, I don’t think anybody listens to music with the expectation that they’re going to be presented with a sort of landscape painting.

As a rule, my focus is on classical music, but I love jazz. I love everything, actually.

I’ve always had a close connection to both rock and classical music.

Right now I’m listening to a lot of different things but I listen to a lot of classical music. Eventually I would like to compose and perform classical.

I’d like to explode a few myths about what we call classical music. It’s not high art for the titillation of a chosen few.

At a certain point, I became a kind of musician that has tunnel vision about jazz. I only listened to jazz and classical music.

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.

For me, it’s classical music I started with and I admire Jacqueline du Pre.

I also like Western classical music and jazz.

I grew up as a dancer, and music and dance are so closely tied that in ballet class, you’re listening to all this classical music, and in modern class, you’re working with a live drummer. It was something that always made me feel really comfortable, and I’ve had a connection to since the beginning.

I would have to say I might do some stuff, but it’s the film that’s appealing. I was raised on film. My musical experience is all via film, it’s not from classical music.

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.

Classical music requires an immense amount of concentration, and I don’t know if I would’ve been that committed to that particular life.

I love Western classical music – I grew up on that thanks to my parents who loved it too.

I definitely want to act, but I also want to score movies, and I have this idea to fuse classical music with other styles that would give it a different perception.

I listen to old jazz and classical music, and that’s it.

I was just moving around the globe, learning classical music and generally doing nothing. I was completely away from glitz and glamour and did not miss it at all.

Music was around in my family in two ways. My mother would occasionally sing to me, but I was mostly stimulated by the classical music my father had left behind. I had an ear for music, I suppose, so that’s what began my interest in music.

I grew up with classical music blasting in my parents’ living room and my older brother’s practicing saxophone in his room listening to jazz… a beautiful chaos.

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.

I’m a self-confessed geek, and my whole concept of music at first was entirely electronic. In many ways, it turned out to be an advantage. I was so green, so utterly naive about the nature of classical music, that I did things that made me look totally, deliberately unorthodox.

When you learn Indian classical music, sometimes it takes decades to perfect a raga.

I wanted ‘The South Bank Show’ to reflect my own life and that of the team around me; to stretch the accepted boundaries and challenge the accepted hierarchies of the arts; to include pop music as well as classical music, television drama as well as theatre drama, and high-definition performers in comedy.

It depends on my mood but classical music is what I am drawn towards. I also listen to Sufi music and bhajans too.

I heard Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, and that was it. I didn’t ever want to be anything else. I just started banging away and semi-studied classical music at the Royal Academy of Music but sort of half-heartedly.

What is classical music if not the epitome of sensuality, passion, and understated erotica that popular music, even with all of its energy and life, cannot even begin to touch?

I find that classical music helps put me in a place that is very calming and allows me to express emotion through my body. I played clarinet as a child, so I guess I have a bit of a musical ear.

Just going to Bangladesh was an experience… if you go into small villages in the U.K., they’re backward and culturally devoid. But if you go into small villages in Bangladesh, they have classical music concerts.

I started playing music when I was about six and didn’t discover Indian classical music until I was fifteen. So, essentially, I had a lot of catching up to do.

It is interesting that our biggest fans are the greatest names of the classical music scene, such as Julian Rachlin, Janine Jansen, Mischa Maisky and Gidon Kremer. They even make guest appearances in our concerts occasionally.

I love Adele and Lykke Li. I also listen to classical music as well.

There’s certainly no doubt that commercialism has entered classical music to such a degree that almost no one seems to care anymore about the physical and mental health of the performer.

The first concert that my parents took me to was in this canyon in Saudi Arabia called Buttermilk Canyon. You sleep under the stars in the desert, and ex-pats – German, Swiss, Canadian, American – would play classical music that filled the whole canyon.

We have such a great depth of human history in all of the arts, whether it’s opera or mathematics or painting or classical music or jazz. There’s so many things to study, new books to read, and certainly always ways to transform old ideas and to come up with new ones.

Classical music has become rarefied, like a maiden aunt that nobody wants to talk to.

I have been trained for three years in Hindustani classical music. I keep humming and many Bollywood co-stars have been victimized by my relentless singing.

When K. Vishwanath made the film ‘Shankarabharanam,’ he wanted to bring back Carnatic classical music to mainstream. It’s popularity was waning in those days.

I had a big background in listening to classical music and I started trying to compose, like I was playing the guitar but I heard an orchestra in my head.

I like to think that I listen to Classic FM while domestic goddessing and, truth be told, I often do, but you know sometimes classical music can get a bit hectic and I just want to turn all the violins right down. That’s when I pop the telly on.

There was a time when people were afraid that film music would totally displace classical music.

My roots are in classical music and jazz, and I want the freedom of being able to improvise. This freedom is possible only in a live concert.

I like classical music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and I adore Bach above all.

To this day, I adore classical music, and I’m very interested in opera, which I found out later my father was also extremely fond of.

I think classical dance is not seeing the evolution seen by classical music.

There is a reactionary conservative side of classical music, which is not the most exciting side of it. The side that draws me in, there’s a real encouragement of risk-taking, going back to masters of that tradition like Beethoven and Bartok and Stravinsky.

Music has always been transnational; people pick up whatever interests them, and certainly a lot of classical music has absorbed influences from all over the world.

Although I enjoyed writing Film Music it was always a means to an end, in that it enabled me to keep a wife and family and write my classical music, which has always been my passion.

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.

You cannot go wrong by learning classical music because it trains the ear.

We are working on organising classical music festivals in a bid to promote qawwali there and produce films that promote music. Perhaps people lack the talent as yet, but at least there’s a stable platform available to promote this as an art form.

I’m not really involved with politics… I’m living in my cocoon with my classical music around.

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.

I love gentle, gorgeous classical music such as Mozart.

I was able to learn a new language – a new musical language is learning a new language, because it’s so extremely different from Western classical music. African music is completely different.

I studied classical music for a long time, maybe 10 years, and I realized finally I was never going to have the hands to play that stuff.

I studied classical music in the Conservatory of Paris.

I enjoy practicing law too much to even contemplate retiring, but I often think about engaging in serious study of the history of art, of the intricacies of classical music. I could write a fugue, or perhaps learn to play the cello.

I am really very fond of Indian classical music though I have spent my teenage years in Bahrain.

I had this exceptional classical music voice. If I’d followed a true path for my talent, I would have ended up being an opera singer.

Jazz is not the popular culture. Jazz is in the same position in our culture as classical music. A very small minority of people really love it.

People think you go home and be a celeb, sipping Laurent-Perrier and listening to classical music. You don’t. You go home and wash some pants in the sink.

There are so many wonderful, wonderful musicians in the world, I cannot possibly make a distinction between the fact that they might play classical music, or bluegrass, or Irish traditional, or Indian music.

In the ballet studio, it was such an organized and disciplined environment, like I’d never had in my life. Seeing myself in the mirror, surrounded by the classical music, that’s when I started to fall in love with dance.

I do not think classical music faces any threat because new music is being made through computer, as the real charm of classical is its purity, and one who is seeking purity will surely find classical music in spite of so many alternatives.

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.

For me, I’m way more at home in heavy metal than I am in classical music.

I went to a music academy in Los Angeles, and some friends started playing me Ravel and Prokofiev, who I liked, but what really blew me away was ‘The Rite of Spring.’ That’s what made me get interested in classical music for real and want to study it.

The type of music we know as classical music began with rich people hiring musicians or owning them in a way. Without funding, it’s very hard to have this experience. Be it state money or private money, there has to be someone dedicated to raising the money.

Me, who’s educated classically, I went toward rock music ’cause it was sort of a natural evolution from where I was playing with my brother. But I was always drawn back into classical music.

My parents were decent, aspirant first-generation middle class. They read ‘Reader’s Digest’, listened to classical music; my grandparents had a bust of Stalin on the mantelpiece. The kids of that generation were terrified of being below par, class-wise.

I was raised with a lot of classical music. I loved ballet. I was a bun head for 10 years.

I have a classical music background. I studied violin and trumpet.

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 have an issue with classical music.

It wasn’t until I found my tribe of artists – people who were outspoken and not afraid to say what they thought, whether in a song or a dance or a piece of classical music – that I found a refuge.

I am not doing something that it is experimental music in relation to classical music.

For me, let’s keep jazz as folk music. Let’s not make jazz classical music. Let’s keep it as street music, as people’s everyday-life music. Let’s see jazz musicians continue to use the materials, the tools, the spirit of the actual time that they’re living in, as what they build their lives as musicians around.

I like classical music. I especially like the French composers: Ravel in particular. Debussy. That’s so soothing in a nervous world.

I started off with classical music, and I got into jazz when I was about 14 years old. And I’ve been playing jazz ever since.

I had this idea for a while to do mix this Al Green vibe with a samba thing. I tried to do that in many different ways. Peter added his own modern notion of funk and his own deep background in classical music.

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 love hip-hop; I love Sleigh Bells. I also love classical music and musical theater.

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.

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 conservatory professors thought everything should sound like French and German symphonies. But to my ear, bouzouki songs, which tell the sufferings and heartaches of ordinary people, offered a way to make classical music available not just to the upper classes.

I believe that classical music comes through listening and practice, and it can be fun both for the singer or performer and the listener or audience, as long as the performer is taught to recognise the pulse of the audience.

I listen to classical music when I need to relax. It depends a lot on mood.

What I do for migraines when I get them, I listen to classical music, and I turn it up really loud.

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.

Even in classical music, the cello doesn’t get a lot of respect because the piano and the violin get it all.

It’s not that people don’t like classical music. It’s that they don’t have the chance to understand and to experience it.

Indian classical music is charming and currently there are a wide range of musicians who bring great classical tunes to the Bollywood industry.

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.

Generally, we tend to believe that royalty is only for mainstream Hindi commercial cinema music and maybe some popular ghazal singer or pop singer but we never think that classical music is played at so many places.

I would love to hone my skills and learn Indian classical music. It’s a vast sea of melodies and ragas, and I enjoy it immensely.

At the age when Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry, I was listening to European classical music.

Classical music presents some of the world’s most challenging pieces.

Even the most jingoistic person would have to admit that even American cultural music comes from Europe. That’s what classical music is, real European music.

One of the struggles that I have with classical music is the way one thinks about a recapitulation. There’s always this idea of themes, and I have trouble with that.

Classical music gives musicians a kick. But African music gives everyone a kick.

I am a classical music lover – not necessarily the contemporary stuff, but the old stuff.

It is so important for people at a young age to be invited to embrace classical music and opera.

I have very eclectic tastes. I love soul and Motown; I listen to some rap – Stormzy, Tinie Tempah, Drake. I also love classical music, American country and the folk tradition. I often start the day with gospel on my way to work. The only thing I have never got into is punk.

I do like classical music, and soft rock, and jazz, which I never listened to when I was 15. Now I like it. The older you get, the more tolerant you get, right?

I did classical music when I was a teenager, but the experience of performing a classical concert felt too frighteningly pristine for me to continue with it.

There should be no boundaries in your relationship with sound. Often it’s not about the music itself but the context in which you hear the music. For instance, listening to a piece of classical music in a film you love often changes your perception of it entirely.

We always found that many people are robots without knowing it. The interpreters of classical music, Horowitz for example, they are like robots, making a reproduction of the music which is always the same. It’s automatic, and they do it as if it were natural, which is not true.

Jazz is a white term to define black people. My music is black classical music.

I’m very fond of classical music, especially Mozart. I find it relaxes me and helps me concentrate.

I enjoy listening to classical music and heavy metal. I play basketball and try to go diving at least once a year. I don’t really have hobbies in the traditional sense… I engage in too many activities already through the actions of my characters.

I grew up listening to – it’s kind of embarrassing – all classical music.

I got a classical piano training when I was little, and we also had music study lessons where we’d have to listen to a lot of classical music.

My husband is a former rocker and in charge of our humungous music collection, and I’ve recently been asking him for classical music.

My parents are both musicians and made sure we all played music. My brothers and sisters all play instruments, so we’ll get together whenever we can and play. We play a lot of classical music – you know, the good stuff.

I had to listen to the classical music because it calms me down, calms my nerves down.

Actually, I’ve had very little classical training, although I love listening to classical music very much.

As far as using electronics in my music, I have to do that as honestly as possible. Also, I have a broad range of listeners from a classical music base, as well as people, like me, who listen to a lot of different music. So I’m mindful of letting my sitar playing remain at the center of what I do.

It’s really funny how I’ve come round to classical music around the back door with my banjo in my hand, and I love it.

I’ve worked with some great orchestras and amazing classical musicians, but I don’t like the conceptualization of classical music as an elitist form of art.

It falls in all the cracks, from classical music to jazz,. Anywhere there’s a hole in the floor, my music falls through it. But that’s OK.

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.

Because in classical music cello is not regarded as a popular choice, it’s always playing the long, boring notes.

The origins of Indian classical music, not unlike their western counterparts, lie in the Vedas, the ancient Hindu scriptures of 2,000 years ago.

I was part of a very uncool group. It was a group that liked classical music. They were known as the Music School Gang or, less charitably, the Poof Gang.

I don’t even want to say I’m trying to necessarily popularize classical music, I just want to take this thing, this cello, this sound, and make it artistic so people can understand it today.

My parents loved classical music. And my father adored Mozart. But for some reason, I always had a reaction against it.

My greatest influence came from my parents’ love of classical music. We listened to a lot of arias and operas growing up.

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.

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.

In Germany, people feel like they own classical music, that it is somehow theirs. Over there, everyone still learns to play, and the great composers don’t seem alien.

Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

I abhor the words ‘classical music.’ Few things satisfy me more than a really good cover version.

The classical music world is so snobbish.

I play only classical music. My pianos are my only big indulgence, but they’re a necessity. When I’m playing the piano is literally the only time I can be completely abstract and disconnected from the regular world and yet be connected – to my music.

I come from a small village and have had no formal training in music or any classes from the masters of Indian classical music.

Musical themes developing is a lot of what classical music is based on, and exposition and recapitulation – these kinds of things I find oppressive.

We have always played classical music and always loved dance and pop music.

Any form of classical music is made for youth.

Jon Anderson and I, we really liked a lot of classical music, and we wanted to get some orchestral arrangements going on ‘Time And A Word.’

But those musics do not address the larger kind of architecture in time that classical music does, whatever each one of us knows that classical music must mean.

I used to sing classical music to the flowers in the garden and imagine they were all different parts of the orchestra. It used to really annoy the neighbours.

I finished my university studies with classical music while being in a successful metal band, but that was not an easy task at all.

I listen to classical music very much. There’s a lot of jazz that I don’t enjoy listening to.

I’m actually doing what I like doing, which is mixing opera music and classical music with soul and folk. And I was writing and talking about what I’ve actually experienced, and I don’t think that’s very common.

That makes classical music work, the ability to improvise.

Indian classical music is in my blood.

New music is absolutely integral to classical music.

I would not want the limitations held by the name of a classical musician. I want many people to enjoy my music much beyond just classical music fans. I think the term, ‘violinist,’ keeps me distant from the audience. I want to communicate with them more.

It’s something he used to say when he was happy. It could be a very, very simple day. We might be sitting out on the front lawn. Dad loved classical music and we might be listening to some Stravinsky or something and having some tea and eggs. And he’d say, ‘Oh, good stuff, isn’t it?’

Both parents were very encouraging – especially my father. My father thought the sun rose and set with me. Neither one had a musical background or any musical talent. They liked classical music, but neither could carry a tune.

It’ll help you be imaginative if you listen to classical music. It helps you understand dynamics and how important they are to create an environment.

Growing up, there was only classical music on BBC Radio. We had to listen to the American Forces Network in Germany, which played pop songs, or the pirate radio boats off the coast.

You know I’m a bit of a dag because I listen to classical music. I recently bought myself an iPod and downloaded every piece of classical music that I had access to onto that.

To most white people, jazz means black and jazz means dirt, and that’s not what I play. I play black classical music.

Western classical music is participative. Look at the number of people who are involved in a symphony.

I just loved classical music, but I also loved playing rock guitar, and I loved playing piano, so it was a natural thing that those things would merge at some point.

It’s wonderful doing concerts in places like New York and London, but I feel a responsibility to also bring my work home, to bring world-class, classical music to Somerset.

Our first show, ‘A Little Nightmare Music,’ encompasses a lot of zany humor with beautiful classical music.

Once, the arts were opera, ballet, classical music, and everything else deemed highbrow.

I don’t want to put a name on my music. Other people can put a name on what I do. It’s just the union of what I’ve been listening to and what I’ve been learning. It has some elements of classical music, it has some rock, it has some jazz, but I don’t want to give it a name.

There is nothing else is India which is as popular as Bollywood. Look at Indian classical music, how big and how respected it is in the West, but here in India, no one is interested.