Chopin, Schubert, and Liszt had no idea of how to write for the piano.

I love music. I have a fondness for Chopin, and I very much like his 'Raindrop Prelude.'

I got obsessed with classical music, I got obsessed with Chopin, with playing the piano.

We soaked up everything from Beethoven to Chopin to Jimi Hendrix to Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan.

I play the piano and have been playing since I was 7, mainly classical Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart.

Chopin was a master of melody, harmony and voice leading - the art of smoothly moving from chord to chord.

I do not sing nor play, but I adore music, particularly Chopin. I like him because I cannot understand him.

When I was 5 or 6, I was messing around with the piano, and I listened to everything from Chopin to boogie-woogie.

I used to get into the government car and switch on Chopin or someone I liked to hear at the end of a parliamentary day.

Chopin is a great composer who influenced many, many important composers. He was a great innovator, especially in harmony.

I've got great joy from rediscovering Western music. I love Schumann and Chopin, and those amazing symphonies of Bruckner.

Chopin or Billy Eckstine or Miles Davis - that stuff helps me, more when I've already written and I need a little energy to keep editing.

I cannot listen to Beethoven or Mahler or Chopin or Bach when I write because those composers require you stop what you are doing and listen.

I've loved Alfred Cortot's playing from an early age, and I never tire of hearing his recordings, particularly Chopin and Schumann from the 1920s and '30s.

My mother Elizabeth Ivey Brubeck was a pianist who studied with Dame Myra Hess and Tobias Matthey. As a child in California I used to listen to her play Chopin.

My mother was a very talented pianist, and she was a music teacher who hated to teach music, actually, but she loved to play, so I was brought up with Chopin, Debussy and Mozart.

Scriabin slept with Chopin under his pillow, and I slept with Wagner under mine. I could not concentrate on memorizing Bach fugues, but I had all of 'Gotterdammerung' in my fingers.

I used to play the piano by listening to it - like Chopin pieces, when I was, like, a little kid - and then the minute my parents got me lessons to read music, I couldn't do it anymore.

No two composers were more totally at home in front of the piano than Debussy and Chopin, hands to keys to strings to sound waves to pen and paper in one perfect gesture of inspiration.

I really don't think I have that much of the gift; I have a little bit, but I wish I were Schubert or Chopin or Beethoven, though Beethoven had a very difficult time writing melody, too.

When I was a kid, I'd practise Chopin on piano - and I love Chopin! He's my dawg! Then I'd go out on the stoop and blast the radio. I'm from New York, the concrete jungle. Hip-hop influenced me from day one.

It is important for the musician to learn as much about the composer as possible and to study the music he has written. Then, even a short piece by Brahms or Chopin can be played with much more understanding.

I always try to avoid looking at the section where my books would be shelved, but I do know that my most reliable neighbor to the right is Kate Chopin's 'The Awakening', which is dispiriting. That's a book I don't want to re-read.

It's all magic to me. Country to punk rock, all of it. Chopin to Kurt Cobain. But it always all comes back to punk for me, because that was the last time, punk rock or grunge rock, was the last time that passion ruled the airwaves.

On Saturday afternoons when all the things are done in the house and there's no real work to be done, I play Bach and Chopin and turn it up real loudly and get a good bottle of chardonnay and sit out on my deck and look out at the garden.

There is no piece of guitar music that has the formal beauty of a piano sonata by Mozart, or the richly worked out ideas and passion of a late Beethoven string quartet, or for that matter the beautiful mellifluous poetry of a Chopin Ballade.

I was growing up in a communist time, especially, and the other music, the western music, was banned, so on radio half of the music was Chopin. So my colleagues and I were a little bit allergic to this music because it was everywhere - everywhere!

When my dad went to college to get his master's from Loyola, he was playing Debussy and Chopin and Beethoven. But he played all that New Orleans stuff, too. I would go with my dad to gigs, pick up the piano and the speakers, and I would be like his roadie.

I loved Debussy, Stravinsky, Chopin, Tchaikovsky, anything with romantic melodies, especially the nocturnes. Nietzsche was a hero, especially with 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra.' He gets a bad rap; he's very misunderstood. He's a maker of individuals, and he was a teacher of teachers.

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.

I've not been an admirer of contemporary music since punk rock went off the boil in 1977, but once a year I'll listen to 'Spiral Scratch' by the Buzzcocks, or 'Hippy Hippy Shake' by the Swinging Blue Jeans. Otherwise, I can put up with Chopin or shakuhachi flute in the background.

'Basic Black with Pearls' contains overt references to Virginia Woolf and covert ones to feminist classics like Kate Chopin's 'The Awakening' and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper.' The scholar Ruth Panofsky, who writes extensively about Weinzweig, sees echoes of George Eliot.

I grew up in Deptford in south London, and at that time I used to wear toppers, loon pants and tonic suits from shops like Take 6 and Topman. I was a bit of a soul boy, but I had a very eclectic taste in music - I was into James Brown and Bowie; and I was the only kid in the neighbourhood who would also be listening to Chopin.

Find a beautiful piece of art. If you fall in love with Van Gogh or Matisse or John Oliver Killens, or if you fall love with the music of Coltrane, the music of Aretha Franklin, or the music of Chopin - find some beautiful art and admire it, and realize that that was created by human beings just like you, no more human, no less.

They both changed the way we hear the sound of the piano, both of them inventors of sonority: Chopin took bel canto singing lines and reproduced them on the keyboard above richly upholstered counterpoint; Debussy somehow preserved vibrations in the air, blending their ephemeral magic into music that reaches far back into deep memory.

Musical compositions can be very sad - Chopin - but you have the pleasure of this sadness. The cheap consolation is: you will be happy. The higher consolation is the pleasure and recognition of your unhappiness, the pleasure of having recognised that fate, destiny and life are such as they are and so you reach a higher form of consciousness.

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