Pianist Quotes - Page 7

• Once in a while, a teacher gets rewarded with a brilliant student. My two years with Dan Szabo at the New England Conservatory were indeed a gift -- he is a pianist with unlimited potential and a composer that makes my heart sing. I deeply feel that he is an important musician for the coming years.

  Bob Brookmeyer

  Teacher, Heart, Unlimited Potential

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• Painting is something that you need to do, if not every day, then certainly most days. It is almost like being a pianist: if you stop, you lose something.

  John Berger

  Needs, Painting, Ifs

  "John Berger: a life in writing" by Nicholas Wroe, www.theguardian.com. April 22, 2011.

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• Horror would not annoy a soldier any more than the sight of a hammer annoys a carpenter. It is sentimental to pretend that horror is not the tool of the soldier, just as the hammer is the tool of the carpenter. We live off death and the threat of death and we must take it calmly and use it well.... Eventually I came to enjoy killing, as a pianist enjoys the Czerny which keeps his fingers limber for the Beethoven.

  Irwin Shaw

  Sight, Soldier, Hammers

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• Pianists call me a composer, composers call me a pianist. The classicists think me a futurist, and the futurists call me a reactionary.

  Anton Rubinstein

  Thinking, Composer, Call Me

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• My parents told me I would become a doctor and then in my spare time I would become a concert pianist. So, both my day job and my spare time were sort of taken care of.

  Amy Tan

  Jobs, Taken, Doctors

  "Author of The Joy Luck Club". The Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 28, 1996.

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• I would have given my right arm to have been a pianist.

  Bobby Robson

  Funny, Music, Motivation

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• The people who raised me musically are my mother, who is a classically trained pianist, and my stepfather.

  Jeff Buckley

  Mother, People, Stepfathers

  "New Again: Jeff Buckley". Interview with Ray Rogers, www.interviewmagazine.com. May 28, 2013.

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• Pianists don't argue too much generally because we have a hard enough time just getting things right. Arguing is for string players.

  Emanuel Ax

  Player, Enough Time, Too Much

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• My father was a stone mason, and a talented amateur pianist and vocalist.

  John E. Walker

  Father, Stones, Masons

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• Hearing Marilyn Crispell play solo piano is like monitoring an active volcano. She is one of a very few pianists who rise to the challenge of free jazz.

  Jon Pareles

  Volcanoes, Play, Piano

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• Real data is messy. ...It's all very noisy out there. Very hard to spot the tune. Like a piano in the next room, it's playing your song, but unfortunately it's out of whack, some of the strings are missing, and the pianist is tone deaf and drunk- I mean, the noise! Impossible!

  Tom Stoppard

  Song, Real, Mean

  Tom Stoppard (2013). “Tom Stoppard Plays 5: The Real Thing; Night & Day; Hapgood; Indian Ink; Arcadia”, p.62, Faber & Faber

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• That's a very high goal to have, study eight hours a day to be a concert pianist.

  Nina Simone

  Eight, Goal, Study

  Source: boscarol.com

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• I consider the first 20 performances just learning the piece. Think about it this way: If you think about a pianist who plays a Schubert sonata through his whole lifetime - if you listen to Rubenstein or Horowitz playing their repertoire later in their life, you understand the richness with which they play that music, and how differently they must have played it when they were younger.

  Philip Glass

  Thinking, Play, Pieces

  "Ira Glass Interviews His Cousin, Composer Philip Glass". www.wbur.org. September 21, 1999.

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• I ... started out to become a jazz pianist; in the meantime I started singing and I sang the way I felt and that's just the way it came out.

  Nat King Cole

  Singing, Way, Jazz

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• Liberace was certainly master and commander of the ivories ~ he is the only pianist I can watch or listen to without suffering a case of 'Stagefright Sympathy Sickness'.

  E. A. Bucchianeri

  Ivory, Suffering, Watches

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• The study of how substances alter gene expression is part of the field of epigenetics. Some chemical exposures appear to turn on and turn off genes in ways that disregulate cell growth and predispose for cancer. From this perspective, our genes are less the command-and-control masters of our cells and more like the keys of piano, with the environment as the hands of the pianist.

  Sandra Steingraber

  Cancer, Piano, Keys

  Sandra Steingraber (2010). “Living Downstream: An Ecologist's Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment”, p.19, Da Capo Press

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• I actually think that many of the musicians who have something meaningful to say don't win competitions. An incredible pianist like Horowitz had so much to say, but he might not win anything in competition because of his wrong notes.

  Charlie Albright

  Meaningful, Winning, Thinking

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• I was the first person in my family born in the United States. My mom is from Croatia, and my dad is from Iran. They met at music school in Belgium. I grew up as a pianist.

  Ottessa Moshfegh

  Mom, Dad, School

  "Character Finds A Path Out Of Her Personal Prison In 'Eileen'". "Weekend Edition Saturday" with Scott Simon, www.npr.org. August 15, 2015.

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• Some pianists seem to really remember the keys and not so much the notes they play. They want to learn until it's a physical habit that can be replicated. For pianists, this is much more of a problem than for other instruments, like the violin, where you actually have to think of the pitch.

  Carlo Grante

  Thinking, Keys, Play

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• Singers actually used to begin singing at a much younger age than they do now. I would say for me, I started late. But it's not unusual. I discovered I had a voice. I wanted to be a pianist when I was seven, and circumstances didn't allow that I studied it.

  Dolora Zajick

  Voice, Singing, Age

  "For Opera Powerhouse Dolora Zajick, 'Singing Is Connected To The Body'". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, www.npr.org. September 25, 2015.

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• Why is a person who plays the piano called a pianist but a person who drives a racing car not called a racist?

  Steven Wright

  Funny, Humor, Play

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• Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of a manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.

  Peter Watts

  Running, Climbing, Dancer

  Peter Watts (2006). “Blindsight”, p.302, Macmillan

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• My mother Elizabeth Ivey Brubeck was a pianist who studied with Dame Myra Hess and Tobias Matthey. As a child in California I used to listen to her play Chopin.

  Dave Brubeck

  Mother, Children, Play

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• This was solidarity. The debutante having her toenails pedicured - the housewife buying carrots from a pushcart - the bookkeeper who had wanted to be a pianist, but has the excuse of a sister to support - the businessman who hated his business - the worker who hated his work - the intellectual who hated everybody - all were united as brothers in the luxury of common anger that cured boredom and took them out of themselves, and they knew well enough what a blessing it was to be taken out of themselves.

  Ayn Rand

  Brother, Taken, Blessing

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• My mother was the first woman in the county in Indiana where we were born, in Jay County, to have a college degree. She was educated as a pianist and she wanted to concertize, but when the war came she was married, had a family, so she started teaching.

  Twyla Tharp

  Mother, War, Teaching

  "A Conversation With Choreographer Twyla Tharp". Interview with Daviv Shenk, www.theatlantic.com. February 26, 2010.

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