I've been traveling all over the world for 25 years, performing, talking to people, studying their cultures and musical instruments, and I always come away with more questions in my head than can be answered.
The cello is such a melancholy instrument, such an isolated, miserable instrument.
At last a dream come true. The Instrument of Instruments.
We're a symphony--our limbs and lips and skin making up the instruments, working together to create a beautiful piece of music.
A brick could be used as a musical instrument. It doesn’t matter how bad it sounds, because I’ll be the band’s lead singer, and my sexy voice is like melted butter on a corn on the cob lodged directly into your anus.
Music has always been in my family, but it was mainly keyboards. I learned to play classical piano, but when I first heard the amazing bass guitar of James Jamerson, who played on all the big Motown hits of the '60s and '70s, I knew bass guitar was m...
After my second-to-last record, 'The Greatest', I had gone on tour for a while, and I didn't play an instrument for about five years. And I got kind of - it's not self-esteem or whatever, or anger toward myself - but disappointed in myself that I had...
Performing arts buildings are complex. The acoustics, the sight lines and all that have to just be perfect. So you begin with just making these things sublime as musical instruments. And if you fail there, you have failed it all.
By exchanging notes, you get to know one another, to understand one another. As if your souls were connected and your hearts were overlapping. It's a conversation through instruments. A miracle that creates harmony. In that moment, music transcends w...
If there's any object in human experience that's a precedent for what a computer should be like, it's a musical instrument: a device where you can explore a huge range of possibilities through an interface that connects your mind and your body, allow...
We start a lot with melodies and instrumentation and trying to figure out good melodies for verses and choruses. We get to lyrics sometimes second, so we'll start humming a melody, finding something, and see where the music takes you as far as lyrics...
Growing up in Louisiana, my grandmother gave me an accordion because of our Cajun heritage. What ended up happening was I started learning about more instruments, so I just kind of went that route. Music's really all I've ever done.
Any object, whether animate or inanimate, will have a size. Airplanes, boats, or musical string instruments vary in size just like animals and plants, and in all cases, their size and their material construction are totally different matters even tho...
I just prefer instrumental. I don't need to hear what other people are singing. And if I need music as a backdrop to work or to think, I need to have that part of the brain clear - I don't need people feeding their fantasies into my vision.
I conceived of an instrument that would create sound without using any mechanical energy, like the conductor of an orchestra. The orchestra plays mechanically, using mechanical energy; the conductor just moves his hands, and his movements have an eff...
What I've learned how to do as I've gotten older is to take all of the information that I have, and push it aside, and try to distill each song into an emotional theme. The hardest thing that I've ever had to learn how to do in playing music is use t...
Performing music is the job that has the most to do with the belief in the existence of a soul. I deal in Berg's soul, in Brahm's soul- that's my job. And you can can challenge me, but I find that music is humans' most advanced achievement, more so t...
The finest music in the room is that which streams out to the ear of the spirit in many an exquisite strain from the little shelf of books on the opposite wall. Every volume there is an instrument which some melodist of the mind created and set vibra...
Revolution is an instrument, like a party is an instrument.
I mix Indian instruments with Western instruments all the time.
My work on hyper instruments started with simple instruments, like the piano.
