Musical Performance Quotes

• Free improvisation, in addition to being a highly skilled musical craft, is open to use by almost anyone-beginners, children, and non-musicians. The skill and intellect required is whatever is available. Its accessibility to the performer is, in fact, something which appears to offend both its supporters and detractors....And as regards method, the improvisor employs the oldest in music-making...Mankind's first musical performance couldn't have been anything other than a free improvisation.

  Derek Bailey

  Music, Children, Skills

  52 Copy quote

• Free improvisation, in addition to being a highly skilled musical craft, is open to use by almost anyone - beginners, children, and non-musicians.

  Derek Bailey

  Children, Musical, Crafts

  Derek Bailey (1992). “Improvisation: its nature and practice in music”

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• Wine is inspiring and adds greatly to the joy of living.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Wine, Joy, Add

  15 Copy quote

• If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.

  Simon Rattle

  Music, Piano, Composer

  8 Copy quote

• Typography is to literature as musical performance is to composition: an essential act of interpretation, full of endless opportunities for insight or obtuseness.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Opportunity, Endless Opportunities, Design

  11 Copy quote

• In terms of brain development, musical performance is every bit as important educationally as reading or writing.

  Oliver Sacks

  Reading, Writing, Musical

  32 Copy quote

• In the circle where I was raised, I knew of no one knowledgeable in the visual arts, no one who regularly attended musical performances, and only two adults other than my teachers who spoke without embarrassment of poetry and literature — both of these being women. As far as I can recall, I never heard a man refer to a good or a great book. I knew no one who had mastered, or even studied, another language from choice. And our articulate, conscious life proceeded without acknowledgement of the preceding civilisations which had produced it.

  Shirley Hazzard

  Teacher, Art, Book

  4 Copy quote

• I think 'SNL' is so well-known for its musical performances, as well, and people really breaking into America through a really great performance on there. So I think me and Gotye are both really excited to be amongst such company. You know, it's great.

  Kimbra

  Thinking, America, People

  "Kimbra And Gotye 'excited' For 'SNL' Appearance" by Jocelyn Vena, www.mtv.com. April 13, 2012.

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• The musical performances do more than enrich the movie; they complete it.

  A. O. Scott

  Musical, Performances

  8 Copy quote

• Clearly, the pleasures wines afford are transitory - but so are those of the ballet, or of a musical performance. Wine is inspiring and adds greatly to the joy of living.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Wine, Joy, Ballet

  7 Copy quote

• ...As every one of us knows, there are some festivals and games in which everything goes right, and every element lifts up, animates, and exalts every other, just as there are theatrical and musical performances which without any clearly discernible cause seem to ascend miraculously to glorious climaxes and intensely felt experiences, whereas others, just as well prepared, remain no more than decent tries.

  Hermann Hesse

  Games, Musical, Trying

  4 Copy quote