A Quote by Gordon Getty

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.
I have to be composed; I have to be poised. I have to remember what my first piano teacher told me: 'You do not touch that piano until you are ready and until they are ready to listen to you.
I started writing songs when I was real young, when I was 3 years old. The piano spoke to me - I don't remember when I wasn't playing piano. My second grade talent show was the first time I performed my own thing. I dressed up as Dracula and played a song called 'Monster Rock' that I wrote. And I won.
I remember, for my fifth birthday, Chet Baker sat me on the upright piano, and he played just for me for a few minutes. I can still remember the pressure of the air on my chest. It was my first physical contact with sound.
Mom and sister played piano growing up; my grandma still plays piano in church. They always beat me over the head trying to get me to play piano, but I was more interested in riding dirt bikes and playing in the mud.
As an example, there is a Japanese composer / singer whose name is Tanimura [Shinji]: he has composed a song entitled entitled "Kazeno Komoriuta" and I have recorded my piano adaptation of this song and honestly I couldn't expect that it would be so difficult and challenging for me to perform my piano version of this beautiful song.
Everybody besides my piano player has been with me since the very first day. We were a four-piece band for a solid two years. It was me playing acoustic and rhythm electric guitar, a bass player, a drummer and a lead guitar player. For a couple of years, we sounded like the Foo Fighters.
Elizabeth Lutyens was the first professional composer that I ever knew. I sent someextremely infantile pieces that I I'd written and got marvellous encouragement andinterest from her... she's certainly the English composer who's influenced me themost.
My grandmother played the piano, and I used to toddle over there and pick out little things that sounded good to me.
A review of his work: His music soon spread throughout Europe, and he was invited to America were he performed the Piano Concerto. He would have wished that he would be remembered as an opera composer, but it was to be his orchestral extravaganzas, mainly the trilogy of Roman pictures that has made his name famous.
Right now Jack lives with me. Jack is my Jack Russell. I also have a Yorkie named Ginger, but Jack and Ginger can't be in the same place at the same time because she is very jealous. Even if Jack's not in the same state, she would growl if she heard his name.
I played the piano as a boy for six years, from the time I was six to 12 years old. My piano lessons ended when my father died because our family had no more money. I used to have a mestiza teacher. She'd come once a week to teach me piano lessons, and she'd bribe me each time with an apple; otherwise, I wouldn't play.
My Dad played the trombone and I think my Mom played the piano for about two years. It is very self-driven. They pushed me to do piano lessons, but they were never forceful about anything. They never pushed me to sing or anything, it was something that I did myself.
I would still describe myself as a hacker. I still remember feeling the magic, the sense of discovery, when I first connected to a bulletin board. It seemed like the world was somehow brighter, the greens were greener. Like I'd stepped through a portal to the other side. I knew back then that things would never be the same again for me.
I've always loved opera; it never occurred to me that I would write a proper libretto. One of my closest friends is a composer, Paul Moravec, and a few years ago, Paul and I were at lunch, and I said to him, "you really have to write an opera." So, he says very casually to me, "I'll do it if you write the libretto." Well, little did I know that the within a couple of years we would end up getting a commission from the Santa Fe Opera to write an opera together, "The Letter," which turned out to be the most successful commissioned opera in the history of the Santa Fe Opera.
When I was five years old, my parents gave me a drum set for Christmas. My mom played the piano, and Dad played the saxophone badly. But that Christmas morning, I remember we all played together, and I thought it was the greatest day ever.
When I finally got together with Rostropovich as a student, he was very focused, almost entirely focused on the music itself, on what the composer had in mind and what he knew about the composer. Many of the works that I played for him had in fact been composed and written for him; he was often the first performer of these works, having known the composers personally.
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