Music quotations :

  • "There are more bad musicians than there is bad music." --Isaac Stern
  • After playing the violin for the cellist Gregor Piatgorsky, Albert Einstein asked, "Did I play well?" "You played relatively well," replied Piatigorsky.
  • "The chromatic scale is what you use to give the effect of drinking a quinine martini and having an enema simultaneously." --Philip Larkin
  • "The sound of a harpsichord: two skeletons copulating on a tin roof in a thunderstorm." --Sir Thomas Beecham
  • "Harpists spend ninety percent of their lives tuning their harps and ten percent playing out of tune." --Igor Stravinsky
  • "Mozart died too late rather than too soon." --Glenn Gould
  • "Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of a bag of nails, with here and there also a dropped hammer." --John Ruskin
  • "Art is long and life is short; here is evidently the explanation of a Brahms symphony." --Edward Lorne
  • "I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws." --Charles Baudelaire
  • "If the reader were so rash as to purchase any of Bela Bartok's compositions, he would find that they each and all consist of unmeaning bunches of notes, apparently representing the composer promenading the keyboard in his boots. Some can be played better with the elbows, others with the flat of the hand. None require fingers to perform or ears to listen too." --Frederick Corder
  • "In the first movement alone, I took note of six pregnancies and at least four miscarriages." --Sir Thomas Beecham on Bruckner's Seventh Symphony
  • "What can you do with it? It's like a lot of yaks jumping about." --Sir Thomas Beecham on Beethoven's Seventh Symphony
  • Sir Thomas Beecham was once asked if he had played any Stockhausen. "No," he replied, "but I have trodden in some."
  • "Rossini would have been a great composer if his teacher had spanked him enough on his backside." --Ludwig van Beethoven
  • "Anton Bruckner wrote the same symphony nine times, trying to get it just right. He failed." --Edward Abbey
  • "Schoenberg is too melodious for me, too sweet." --Bertolt Brecht