Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The Detroit String Quartet played Brahms last night. Brahms lost.
The most perfect expression of human behavior is a string quartet.
How could a New Yorker possibly take something called the Hollywood String Quartet seriously?
I much rather coach a string quartet in an interpretation of Haydn or Beethoven than to teach the guitar.
When I'm scoring something like a string quartet, it's all notated music, so it's meticulously written in the score, which is very different than doing things by ear.
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.
I approach everything as chamber music. Even with Beethoven symphonies, I lead from the violin and basically encourage the orchestra to think of it as a giant string quartet.
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!
My kids will come to me and ask me to listen to a 'new sound' they think they've discovered. One time it was the Beatles' 'Yesterday,' and the new sound was four strings. All of a sudden the new generation discovers the string quartet!
For me, playing music while I write is important. Several of the romantic scenes in 'Paris' were written with Debussy's 'String Quartet,' his 'L'Apres-midi d'une Faune,' or Canteloube's 'Songs of the Auvergne' playing in the background.
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.
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.
'Iceman' covers a bigger scope than 'Long Day's Journey.' But they're both fabulous pieces of work. 'Iceman' is like a symphony. It's got all the movements, all these different voices. 'Long Day's Journey' is more like a beautiful string quartet.