Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The impact of an attacking tiger can be compared to that of a piano falling on you from a second story window. But unlike the piano, the tiger is designed to do this, and the impact is only the beginning.
I'm not everybody's cup of tea. But sometimes criticism can be hurtful. Be respectful. I'm a good piano player, I can sing well, I write good songs. If you don't like it, fair enough. But give me a break.
So the ideology was that: use sounds as instruments, as sounds on tape, without the causality. It was no longer a clarinet or a spring or a piano, but a sound with a form, a development, a life of its own.
I started going to a piano teacher at 5 years old, but pretty soon I started picking things out on my own and stopped taking music lessons. I never could read music very well, but I've still been doing it.
When I was a kid, my parents gave me piano lessons and guitar lessons for a while, but I was never very good at it. I have big, sort of awkward hands. It's hard to keep going when you don't get any better.
Comedy, I figured, was the thing that came to me the most easily. Playing the trumpet and piano took practice. I thought that was a waste of time. I'd go out on the street corner and be funny. In a minute.
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.
I'd studied piano first and switched over to cello when I was about seven. I played mostly chamber and solo classical music. I got really involved with rock music when I was a teenager. I wired up my cello.
Any professional knows that the flute and the piano is a boring combination. All you've got to arrive at is a kind of typical gestural crap, right? You might agree, though you wouldn't call it gestural crap
I liked school and was a bit of an all-rounder academically, I struggled with music. I can't hold a note when singing and abandoned any notion of a career in music after barely scraping a pass in grade 2 piano.
Have I a secret about playing the piano? It's a very simple one. I sit down on the piano stool and make myself comfortable - and I always make sure that the lid over the keyboard is open before I start to play.
Well I like everything but my first love has always been piano because when I started out there was a piano in my house and it was there so I just started tinkling on it really so it's always been my first love.
When my opera Plump Jack was performed in 1989, my first piano teacher sent me something that I'd composed when I was four. I remember I played it, and it still sounded like me. I'm the same composer I was then.
It so happened that Lucy, who found daily life rather chaotic, entered a more solid world when she opened the piano. She was then no longer either deferential or patronizing; no longer either a rebel or a slave.
Writing is like anything - baseball playing, piano playing, sewing, hammering nails. The more you work on it, the better you get. But it seems to take a longer time to get better at writing than hammering nails.
I think sometimes could I only have music on my own terms, could I live in a great city, and know where I could go whenever I wished the ablution and inundation of musical waves, that were a bath and a medicine.
Once, somebody asked Robert Schumann to explain the meaning of a certain piece of music he had just played on the piano. What Robert Schumann did was sit back down at the piano and play the piece of music again.
In Canada pianos needed water. You opened up the back and left a full glass of water, and a month later the glass would be empty. Her father had told her about the dwarfs who drank only at pianos, never in bars.
I know some things when I start. I know, let's say, that the play is going to be a 1970s or a 1930s play, and it's going to be about a piano, but that's it. I slowly discover who the characters are as I go along.
I used to play the piano, I was pretty decent, so that was the only thing I could hold onto in terms of coming up with melodies; but at the time I [still] just couldn't, so my early beats were really sample-based.
At a very early age I began to thump on the piano alone, and it was not long before I was able to pick out a few tunes? I also learned the names of the notes in both clefs, but I preferred not be hampered by notes.
I find that people can’t find you. It’s kind of quiet. When I go to a city, I can almost always get a piano if I need one. So there’s something nice about being on the road and focusing on something you want to do.
I've never really not played the piano. I've played it since I was six or seven and it's something I've always done - I don't think I could ever really play anything else, I would be a bit out of it without a piano.
There weren't sidewalks to skateboard on and malls to hang out in. There wasn't anything to do. And I was too scrawny to play football, and so I decided I was just gonna sit at the piano, because it made more sense.
Well, my piano's really beautiful. I actually have two pianos. I have a Yamaha upright from the '60s that's blond, wood, and black, and I also have one from the '20s from Chicago - not a well-known brand or anything.
I was 20 years old. I had moved to Los Angeles from Columbus, Ohio. I was working as a piano salesman - a terrible piano salesman. I couldn't sell them. I could demonstrate them, but people wouldn't buy them from me.
I was much more interested in the orchestra than the piano, but I did become fairly proficient as a pianist and my teachers felt I had talent and wanted me to become a good concert pianist and earn my living that way.
The piano is the X factor. People have a tough time following the structures when there's no piano there, spelling it out. It makes it more easily understood, particularly to people who don't know as much about music.
It's all very well having a great pianist playing but it's no good if you haven't got anyone to get the piano on the stage in the first place, otherwise the pianist would be standing there with no bloody piano to play.
I sat on the piano bench next to my mother in church. Something happened before I set foot on this planet. I was crawling around inside of her. She was a church pianist. My dad was a brilliant singer. I was hearing it.
I enjoy the challenge of taking something which was not meant for the piano, distilling its essence and writing or improvising it for/at the piano, but having the listener forget that he or she is listening to a piano.
I've speculated about what my life might have been like as a musician, but I'm afraid I came to the conclusion that I probably would've either been teaching piano or maybe gotten to play at Nordstrom's department store.
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.
Bob Erlendson, a local piano player, taught me chord structure and which scales go along with them. Later, I began listening to [pianists] Bill Evans and McCoy Tyner. Then I got interested in [saxophonist] John Coltrane.
There are no rules or certain methods. I usually start with the guitar or piano and sing melodies over the chords. The lyrics seem to be born out of that, and the fact that it's still a mystery to me is my favorite part.
A lot of my approach to the instrument, especially as I've gotten older, is to treat the piano in ways that are not very pianistic - to consider the sounds I'm after first, and to deal with technical considerations later.
At one point I had dreams of being in the school band, but I didn't play an instrument that qualified me, and that was a problem. I always had fantasies to be part of that, but I did take my piano lessons quite seriously.
It was quite impossible to describe. Here is what it looked like. It looked like a piano sounds shortly after being dropped down a well. It tasted yellow, and it felt Paisley. It smelled like the total eclipse of the moon.
There have always been people making music. On their porches, playing folk songs. Playing piano in quiet salons. You don't have to listen to every MySpace page, so what's the difference? It's just noise that you filter out.
Well, my sister played trumpet. Can you imagine having a sister blowing the trumpet around the house, Fred? And my brother, he played piano. Everybody was playing some kind of music, so it was natural for me to get into it.
The one thing I do have is good ears. I don't mean perfect pitch, but ears for picking things up. I developed my ear through piano theory, but I never had a guitar lesson in my life, except from Eric Clapton off of records.
I was taking piano lessons with a very good piano instructor in Toronto, and I'm afraid due to my schedule and discipline, it kind of fell apart. One thing lead to another and I was unable to practice as much as I wanted to.
Got tight last night on absinthe and did knife tricks. Great success shooting the knife underhand into the piano. The woodworms are so bad and eat hell out of all the furniture that you can always claim the woodworms did it.
I always hankered to be a composer - I was mad about music, though I never studied seriously, and can't read a note. But I learned to play the piano and became pretty skillful at improvisation, especially after a drop or two.
Well I mean I just sit at the piano and maybe figure out some harmony or melody or both. Sometimes you can hear it in your head. Sometimes you don't always have to write it down. You just write it down so you can remember it.
I've found that since I've been playing the acoustic, listening to a horn player has left me thinking, well, what can I do with that? But somehow piano players, I feel more of a connection to , now that I'm using the acoustic.
I was reared in the church from the age of three. I've played piano since I was three. I performed at revivals and for my people around North Carolina for several years. People around town collected money to send me to school.
I only write when I'm angry or sad, so because that's when I just have to write... If I'm having a good time and I'm happy and things are going really well, why would I want to stop what I'm doing to go and write at the piano?
Why does the world need a Piano Day? For many reasons. But mostly, because it doesn't hurt to celebrate the piano and everything around it: performers, composers, piano builders, tuners, movers and most important, the listener.
It is long been a principal of ours that one is no more armed because he has possession of a firearm than he is a musician because he owns a piano. There is no point in having a gun if you are not capable of using it skillfully.