Top 11 Quotes & Sayings by Jeremy Denk

It's long been my dream to have myself declared incompetent so I could just practice all day, and blog, and not have to take care of any normal life things.

I'm one of those pianists who tends to ignore every existing recording and lots of traditions about playing pieces when I start.

Ever since I was a kid, I wanted to go to Oberlin and wanted the liberal arts. Obviously I really get intense pleasure out of drawing connections between pieces and poems and literature and ideas.

I've learned a lot from being a chameleon, sort of adopting the musical personalities of who I was playing with.

I was a kid with a lot of different, strange interests - kind of crazy.

It's no accident that Op. 111 attracts literary attention. Though it's music, it doesn't quite behave like it. It seems to be charged with meaning, to communicate in symbols, ciphers, clues.

Perhaps the most serious complaint you could make about Bach is that he has every quality of humanity except imperfection.

As you deal with thumb-crossings, or fingerings for the F-sharp-minor scale, or chromatic scales in double thirds, it is hard to accept that these will eventually allow you to probe eternity in the final movement of Beethoven's last sonata. Imagine that you are scrubbing the grout in your bathroom and are told that removing every last particle of mildew will somehow enable you to deliver the Gettysburg Address.

The only person who can solve the labyrinth of yourself is You.

Sometimes you wish you could go back and ask your teachers again to guide you; but up there onstage, exactly where they always wanted you to be, you must simply find your way. They have given all the help they can; the only person who can solve the labyrinth of yourself is you.

If there's one thing I feel very strongly about, it's that there shouldn't be a distinction between pianists who play Ligeti and those who play Chopin. It might seem that they involve different skill sets, but I don't think that's true: whether playing Ives or Bach or Beethoven, you must bring the same imagination, the same sensitivity, and an ability to deal with same kinds of musical problems. The method behind my madness, anyway, is to keep plugging away at this idea.