String Quartets Quotes

• The Detroit String Quartet played Brahms last night. Brahms lost.

  Bennett Cerf

  Night, Lasts, Detroit

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• One is that you have to take time, lots of time, to let an idea grow from within. The second is that when you sign on to something, there will be issues of trust, deep trust, the way the members of a string quartet have to trust one another.

  Yo-Yo Ma

  Ideas, Issues, Way

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• The most perfect expression of human behavior is a string quartet.

  Jeffrey Tate

  Music, Expression, Perfect

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• I owe very, very much to Mozart; and if one studies, for instance, the way in which I write for string quartet, then one cannot deny that I have learned this directly from Mozart. And I am proud of it!

  Arnold Schoenberg

  Writing, Proud, Way

  Arnold Schoenberg, Christian Meyer, Therese Muxeneder, Arnold Schönberg Center (2005). “Arnold Schönberg: catalogue raisonné”

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• I suppose subconsciously I was thinking in terms of having the scale of it matching the scale of the images. Hence the sort of string quartet, jazz band and electronic stuff.

  Jonny Greenwood

  Thinking, Band, Stuff

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• In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art--the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard's canvases--beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and lawless as the earth had been eons before man had one single coherent thought in his head or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of clay. Beauty was a Savage Garden.

  Anne Rice

  Art, Men, Garden

  Anne Rice (2003). “The vampire Lestat”

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• How could a New Yorker possibly take something called the Hollywood String Quartet seriously?

  Leonard Slatkin

  Hollywood, Strings, Quartets

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• The great thing about string quartets is the players are kind of like family. They work really well as a unit, so you can write things that let them use those talents of association and intuition-all the things they’ve developed together as a group.

  Terry Riley

  Writing, Player, Intuition

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• The Third Quartet I made the instruments in pairs - Two different pairs - Violin and viola, and violin and cello. They played very different things from each other all through the whole piece.

  Elliott Carter

  Two, Different, Pieces

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• A world without tomatoes is like a string quartet without violins.

  Laurie Colwin

  Summer, Food, July

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• Beethoven's string quartets express pain itself; it is not MY pain.

  Karen Armstrong

  Pain, Strings, Quartets

  Interview with Maranda Pleasant, www.marandapleasantmedia.com. April 30, 2013.

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• There was one thing Beethoven didn't do. When one of his string quartets was played, you can believe the second violin wasn't improvising.

  Wynton Marsalis

  Believe, Second Chance, Violin

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• I would like to hear Elliot Carter's Fourth String Quartet, if only to discover what a cranky prostate does to one's polyphony.

  James Sellars

  Musical, Doe, Strings

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• I don't know that I make a big distinction between the big pieces and the little pieces, because I don't experience them in that way. I mean, by the same token, you're out touring with a band and then you're writing string quartets, and in a funny way, isn't it all the same, in a way? It's all just music.

  Philip Glass

  Writing, Mean, Band

  Interview with Bryce Dessner, www.interviewmagazine.com. February 3, 2014.

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• On one hand you have a string quartet, which is not a symphony. On the other hand is you have me sampling them and making it sound like there is many more people playing, so the whole notion of, kind of, sampling applied to classical music is very intriguing to me because composers throughout history have borrowed motifs and quotes from one another.

  DJ Spooky

  Hands, Symphony, People

  Source: bigthink.com

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• I realized very early that I was never going to make by living by writing string quartets. But I wanted to write music and I didn't want to have to do anything else.

  Richard Rodney Bennett

  Writing, Want, Strings

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• A noble space, unlike any other of our time, for it is both strong and delicate. It seems to call at once for a Boeing 747 and for a string quartet.

  Paul Goldberger

  Strong, Space, Boeing 747

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• The pieces that have survived, the ones that we all love, were not all popular in their time. Just look at Beethoven's late string quartets. The music that the musical community selects, however, is usually the very best.

  David Finckel

  Community, Musical, Looks

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• Reading to kids is to ordinary reading what jazz is to a string quartet.

  Sean Wilentz

  Reading, Kids, Library

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• After two hours it stopped raining and in the same moment the spell broke, which Peroquet and the Admiral and Captain Jumeau knew by a curious twist of their senses, as if they had tasted a string quartet, or been, for a moment, deafened by the sight of colour blue.

  Susanna Clarke

  Rain, Sight, Blue

  Susanna Clarke (2009). “Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell”, p.133, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• Why should a novelist not also be a historian? To force unnatural divisions within the English language is to work against its capacious and accommodating nature. To expect a writer to produce only novels, or only histories, is equivalent to demanding from a composer that he or she write only string quartets or piano sonatas.

  Peter Ackroyd

  Writing, Piano, Novelists

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• A Beethoven string-quartet is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses' tails on cats' bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms; but the application of this description in no way precludes the simultaneous applicability of an entirely different description.

  William James

  Horse, Cat, Science

  William James (2015). “Essays in Popular Philosophy: Top Essays”, p.51, 谷月社

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• An evening up on the Empire State roof-the strangest experience. The huge tomb in steel and glass, the ride to the 84th floor and there, under the clouds, a Hawaiian string quartet, lounge, concessions and, a thousand feet below, New York-a garden of golden lights winking on and off, automobiles, trucks winding in and out, and not a sound. All as silent as a dead city-and it looks adagio down there.

  Dawn Powell

  New York, Garden, Cities

  Dawn Powell (1998). “The Diaries of Dawn Powell: 1931-1965”, Zoland Books

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• Part of me is probably more conservative than people realise. I like my old string quartets, I don't like music that's trippy for trippy's sake.

  Bjork

  People, Sake, Conservative

  "'Maybe I'll be a feminist in my old age'". Interview with Liz Hoggard, www.theguardian.com. March 12, 2005.

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