Bach Quotes Page 2

It may be that when the angels go about their task praising God, they play only Bach. I am sure, however, that when they are together en famille they play Mozart.

Women play cellos and violins in symphony orchestras.

They're playing Beethoven and Bach. What do you mean they can't play rock and roll?

Although I don't believe in God, Bach's music shows me what a love of God must feel like.

Bach is a colossus of Rhodes, beneath whom all musicians pass and will continue to pass. Mozart is the most beautiful, Rossini the most brilliant, but Bach is the most comprehensive: he has said all there is to say.

Trying to be a first-rate reporter on the average American newspaper is like trying to play Bach's St Matthew Passion on a ukulele: The instrument is too crude for the work, for the audience and for the performer.

I think in Baroque music, especially in the case of Bach, what really transformed Bach's musical language, what changed it for him was hearing Vivaldi, hearing the sort of manipulation of small cells of information and patterns in order to generate sort of huge blocks of harmony.

If we look at the works of JS Bach ... on each page we discover things which we thought were born only yesterday, from delightful arabesques to an overflowing of religious feeling greater than anything we have since discovered.

I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach into outer space on the Voyager spacecraft. But that would be boasting.

Up to the age of 14 I had not heard a note of anything before 1750, never heard a note of Bach, never heard anything after Wagner, and never heard any real jazz.

I'd like to get something together - like a Handel, Bach, Muddy waters, flamenco type of thing. If I could get that sound, I'd be happy

For the past eighty years I have started each day in the same manner.

.. I go to the piano, and I play preludes and fugues of Bach... It is a sort of benediction on the house.

Bach is the supreme genius of music... This man, who knows everything and feels everything, cannot write one note, however unimportant it may appear, which is anything but transcendent. He has reached the heart of every noble thought, and has done it in the most perfect way.

When people ask me how is it I was a musician, I facetiously say that I'm a firm believer in reincarnation and in a previous life I was Johann Sebastian Bach's guide dog.

Jessica's Daisy Dukes are even shorter than Catherine Bach's, which I honestly didn't think was possible.

But it wasn't just a technical approach towards the piano, studying the music for this film was also a way of approaching the soul of the film, because the film is really about the soul of Schubert and the soul of Bach.

That's why it's called Sebastian Bach.

I mean, it's a permanent band, pretty much, but if I jam with other people, it just makes a better album, I think.

I think J.S. Bach's music stands among humankind's greatest accomplishments. For me, Bach's music is not only as good as music gets, but also as good as it gets, period -- as good as existence, reality, life and the world.

If an artist may say nothing except what he has invented by his own sole efforts, it stands to reason he will be poor in ideas. If he could take what he wants wherever he could find it, as Euripides and Dante and Michelangelo and Shakespeare and Bach were free, his larder would always be full, and his cookery might be worth tasting.

If Beethoven and Bach hooked up with Mozart and made a band, they could be a distant runner up to The D.

I love Bach, I love Beethoven, I love Mozart, I love the Beatles, I love you know, Stockhausen, I love many things. But for some reason I come back to Elizabethan music because it's a little bit like the Beatles.

Take Bach or Schubert: Their music was dedicated to God but filled and shaped their worldly lives. If you are a committed atheist, you lean back and miss all the richness of that history.

On one of those rare occasions when Bach appraised his own life's work, he remarked: I worked hard.

I've outdone anyone you can name -- Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss.

Irving Berlin, he wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500.

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.

There is nothing like a Bach fugue to remove me from a discordant moment.

.. only Bach hold up fresh and strong after repeated playing. I can always return to Bach when the other records weary me.

I was trained completely by ear. And it was actually diving into the Bach that led me to get - there was like a Mel Bay "Teach Yourself How To Sight Read..."

I can find something between sight and hearing and I can produce a fugue in colors as Bach has done in music.

When I was five, I am told, and asked what my favorite things in the world were, I answered, smoked salmon and Bach.

I'm too busy playing. When I'm playing I don't pay attention to who's listening. When I was listening I listened to symphony orchestras, Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Stravinsky. You don't listen to one instrument; you listen to music.

It's easier to interest a conservative audience in pushing the musical boundaries than to involve a young audience used to very noisy, assertive music in something like Schubert or Bach because the further back you go, the less bells and whistles there are.

The fact that Stravinsky used the classics as a major influence is obvious.

What is interesting is how he used them, how he turned Bach into Stravinsky.

What can you say about a twenty-five year old girl who died? That she was beautiful and brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. The Beatles. And me.

I never listen to music when I am writing.

It would be impossible. I listen to Bach in the mornings, mostly choral music; also some Handel, mostly songs and arias; I like Schubert's and Beethoven's chamber music and Sibelius' symphonies; for opera, I listen to Mozart and in recent years Wagner.

I don't think I had a Catherine Bach poster, but I know a lot of my friends desecrated those, big time.

When you are accompanying someone, you are listening to them the way you listen to a Bach Chorale, where four parts are going on at the same time, all of which are gorgeous melodies, all being played simultaneously.