Quotes About Music

While I was writing the songs for 'Fuzz Universe,' I was immersing myself in Bulgarian Female Choir music, Baroque lute and violin pieces, Johnny Cash songs about trains, cows, mules, and mining coal, the Bee Gees, and Ronnie James Dio.

If I started something, I had to finish. Like with violin. I started when I was seven only because my best mate wanted to. I hated it and wanted to quit, but Dad made me continue, and I got to grade seven. My parents said I had to know the value of stuff and work for stuff.

I started with the classical violin when I was 6, and I guess it went well.

I tried to learn the violin for a while.

At the age of nine, playing the violin at school, and then onto the mandolin.

As a young child, I played the violin. I think that that started the spark.

When I first wrote for orchestra, I didn't realize, when you have 20 people playing a violin line, that is very different than one person playing that line.

I think when I was pretty young I got really into the tone of my instrument and I remember just playing one note for an hour to just kind of feel the resonance of the violin.

What drew me to the violin was mastering the instrument technically, which I'm continuing to do.

I've always listened to music while I write, but none of my work has been so directly impacted by a song as my new novel, 'So Cold the River,' for which the brilliant strings piece 'Short Trip Home,' composed by Edgar Meyer and featuring the incredible Joshua Bell on violin, inspired much of the story.

I guess as a kid, I was always creative, and I was involved in music, like piano and violin and choir, so I always knew - I always knew that I wanted to do something that would allow me to be who I am. Generally, that was creatively, imaginatively.

I've played the violin since I was seven but stopped because there was a stage when it became 'uncool'. I was listening to Nirvana and wanted to play the guitar, so I ditched the violin.

An hour of violin lessons in Berlin is an hour where you get the child interested in music. An hour in a violin lesson in Palestine is an hour away from violence, is an hour away from fundamentalism.

My father was a trained accountant, a BCom from Sydenham College and a self-taught violinist. In the 1920s, when he was in his teens, he heard a great violinist, Jascha Heifetz, and he was so inspired listening to him that he bought himself a violin, and with a little help from an Italian teacher, he learned to play it.

The bass line is the anchor for me. I started with the bass, and either doubled that and then added the harmonies, or sometimes added my own harmonies that I've always wanted to sing on the song. And then it just went on from there - singing violin parts and trumpet parts and just trying to emulate the sounds of the instruments.

I usually listen to the same thing over and over again: Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D Major. And Leonard Cohen.

I played the clarinet, and my sister played the violin... If we'd had the discipline and the passion, maybe we could have been good.

I have this weird musical thing I do: I play violin, and I even went on tour with Tim Robbins. We did a bunch of Canadian cities, and then went down to the States, and then we ended up in Japan.

My grandma has a picture of Louis Farrakhan playing violin in her house.

I was classically trained. But more than just the fact that I play violin, there's a lot of classical elements in the way I write, in the way I hear chords. A lot of times, I think of my songs as a symphony made out of electronics rather than instruments. And I love to do orchestral arrangements of my songs after they're done.

I'm incredibly competitive in all sports in a way that is so mystifying to my wife because she grew up playing the violin and piano. I've always been like that.

We had a normal childhood. I played baseball, and we played violin in orchestras three times a week. I learned more from that than anything else.

I had no interest or intention of ever writing music. I was a professional violinist in my 20s. I was obsessed with conducting, and I was conducting as much as I could, and I was studying as much as I could. I went to USC; I got an undergrad degree in violin and a master's degree in conducting.

I play guitar, bass, drums, piano, and pretty much any sort of stringed instrument - besides violin or cello.