A good quartet is like a good conversation among friends interacting to each other's ideas. — Stan Getz
As an improviser I'm now pretty comfortable with trios, so I'm thinking of working up to quartets. — Fred Frith
We are each but a quarter note in a grand symphony. — Guy Laliberte
People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet. — Witold Lutosławski
Musical compositions, it should be remembered, do not inhabit certain countries, certain museums, like paintings and statues. The Mozart Quintet is not shut up in Salzburg: I have it in my pocket. — Henri Rabaud
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
I seldom play in a trio, but acoustic music is likely to be lighter, quicker, and quieter. — Bill Bruford
u201Che G-minor Symphony consists of eight remarkable measures surrounded by a half-hour of banality. — Glenn Gould
Beauty and fullness of tone can be achieved by having the whole orchestra play with high clarinets and a carefully selected number of piccolos. — Gustav Mahler
The violin - that most human of all instruments. — Louisa May Alcott
Orchestras have often been used to conjure up the natural world: Swans, sharks, trout, but not, as far as I know, the often maligned jellyfish. — Bill Bailey
Composers should write tunes that chauffeurs and errand boys can whistle. — Thomas Beecham
Quartet Quotes
Solo dancing does not exist: the dancer dances with the floor: add another dancer and you have a quartet: each dance with the other and each with the floor. — Steve Paxton
All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well. — Julian of Norwich
The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started. — T. S. Eliot
I'll tell you what I would do in a shot if I could. I would sing in the barbershop quartet in The Music Man. — Ned Beatty
Not less of love, but expanding Of love beyond desire, and so liberation From the Future as well as the past. — T. S. Eliot
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. — T. S. Eliot
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
Reading to kids is to ordinary reading what jazz is to a string quartet. — Sean Wilentz
A world without tomatoes is like a string quartet without violins. — Laurie Colwin
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is. — T. S. Eliot
The most perfect expression of human behavior is a string quartet. — Jeffrey Tate
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
How could a New Yorker possibly take something called the Hollywood String Quartet seriously? — Leonard Slatkin
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
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
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
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
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
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 — Anne Rice
The fascination with the music stayed with me for years and I wanted to find out why I liked it so much and to learn the grammar of it, and that's why I tried to write the sheet music down. Writing it down gave me some ideas of other versions of the music and I wrote the first string quartets and piano pieces based on transcriptions. — Gregor Schwellenbach
Beethoven's string quartets express pain itself; it is not MY pain. — Karen Armstrong
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
In Conclusion
Which quotation resonated with you best? Did you enjoy our collection of string quartets quotes? Or may be you have a slogan about string quartets to suggest. Let us know using our contact form.
Citation
Feel free to cite and use any of the quotes in this collection of string quartets quotations. For popular citation styles(APA, Chicago, MLA), please use this citation page.
