Quotes About Bach

Bach opens a vista to the universe. After experiencing him, people feel there is meaning to life after all.

But the whole point is this: Bach had a father.' 'Heavens, Jack, what things you tell me. Yet upon recollection I seem to have known other men in much the same case.

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

Gould recorded Bach's 'Variations' twice but the 1955 one was so fresh. He had a quirky approach to playing and he looked better than anybody: he would lean back on a tiny stool, wearing overcoats and scarves.

I grew up on Bach and Beethoven, and now I'm listening to more modern composers who I can't even name. But since I'm constantly doing music, it's difficult to have that quality time to listen to music and do classical stuff.

You can play Bach on the piano, a symphony orchestra or a quartet of saxophones, but let's stop this silly, childish business of knit your own musicology

I expect that in Heaven, the angels will sing Bach, and they'll envy us our understanding of Beethoven. The unfallen angels don't have to go through the first movements of the 9th symphony to get to the Ode to Joy. But we do.

Technologist Kevin Kelly suggests, "If a thousand lines of letters in UNIX qualifies as a technology, . . . then a thousand lines of letters in English (Hamlet) must qualify as well. They both can change our behavior, alter the course of events, or enable future inventions. A Shakespeare sonnet and a Bach fugue, then, are in the same category as Google's search engine and the iPod. They are something useful produced by a mind.

There's way easier ways to make money, let's just put it that way.

Bach in general was so good with the violin. He just finds the genius way around his music on the instrument.

Yes, I mean like you know, having studied with Yehudi Menuhin that is like some direct route into Bach, because he was one of the foremost interpreters of Bach for the violin.

I grew up playing classical violin and a lot of Bach and Mozart and the things that Einstein loved.

Not "brook" [in German: Bach], but "sea" should he [Johann Sebastian Bach] be called because of his infinite, inexhaustible richness in tone combinations and harmonies. (Nicht Bach! Meer sollte er heissen: wegen seines unendlichen, unerschoepflichen Reichtums an Tonkombinationen und Harmonien.)

The one Bach piece I learnt made me feel I was being repeatedly hit on the head with a teaspoon

The music of Bach, Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann were amongst his favourites.

I was born out of due time in the sense that by temperament and talent I should have been more suited for the life of a small Bach, living in anonymity and composing regularly for an established service and for God

Why waste money on psychotherapy when you can listen to the B Minor Mass?

I think Bach is equally a romantic composer because he laid the seeds harmonically for people like Chopin and the great Romantics, Brahms, so it's difficult to you know all this like labelling and putting - I think Bach is attractive to musicians because he supersedes the labels.

Once I understood Bach's music, I wanted to be a concert pianist. Bach made me dedicate my life to music, and it was that teacher who introduced me to his world.

When we play an unaccompanied Bach suite we may compare ourselves to an actor in Shakespeare's day, creating scenery which did not exist at all, through the power of declamation and suggestion. So in Bach. There is but one voice -- and many voices have to be suggested.