Quotes from Hilary Hahn

The audience will find the artist who matches their interests. If you're not being true to yourself, your audience can't find you, because there's a wall up between who you are and who they're seeing.

Sometimes a person comes into an audience after a rough day, and they want to hear something they know.

Musicians are also interpretive artists and we are just as creative as painters and writers. We interpret in a way that expresses ourselves.

Whenever I work with people who are nonclassical artists, I kind of get a kick in the pants. I think, 'How can I apply what I do to their music?'

I grew up in Baltimore.

You don't need to be a performer in order to dive into the sensory experience of music. Simply get as close as you can to the source of the music.

As a professional, you pick up ideas from your colleagues and the orchestras you work with, while coming up with mutual interpretations in very short periods of time.

I like to take walks and getting out and seeing things. These experiences are so irreplaceable and give you a whole different perspective on the greater context that you're in. If I didn't try to take advantage of that, I'd be missing out on a lot of really interesting things.

Writing is a good creative outlet... it's a supplement to my music.

There's nothing I really wanted to record more than Bach. It's wonderful music. It's - on a grand scale, there's a lot to it. There are - I can work on it for a long time and keep discovering more things, you know, that surprise me every time.

I need to be able to play the music, and so I don't like to have intimidation be part of it.

I grew up not watching TV and I enjoy TV but it kind of takes my brain away from me.

I love performing. The sounds coming at me are dynamic, colorful and multi-layered. The energy from the musicians around me and from the audience is a swirl of excitement. Sometimes, I can feel the stage vibrating under my feet.

I don't think there's such a difference between older and newer music as there is between one composer and another.

It's really been enlightening for me to work with composers because I used to think that everything in the music was exactly what the composer meant. Well, it's what the composer meant in that moment when they wrote it.

You never know what you're going to learn from which pieces and which composers and colleagues are going to influence that thing you think you know.

I've never loved composing, because I feel like other people do it better.

One of the most rewarding things is meeting someone after a concert who has never been to a concert before. It is incredibly rewarding when they say, 'This is my first classical concert.' It is really exciting for everyone.

If you think about it - if you watch a gymnast compete, you don't see their training behind the scenes. You just see the competition. You see the final result when it's polished. And that is very much what people experience with concerts. They go to the concert. And they see the final version.

I am not trying to be cooler or change my image or get into pop music.

When you have a teacher who is part of a tradition, the other people in that tradition are such stars. You just look at them like pop stars.

What I find really interesting is, whenever you see the person who gives you the portrait of yourself, the portrait seems to be a combination of their face and your face.

I try to do a lot of direct contact with the audience, because the audience is part of the concert, too, as much as anyone on stage, and it's a shame not to get to meet them if you get the chance.

Taking on music that's not played very much is a contribution I can give. There's so much I feel that needs more attention.