A Quote by James Ellroy

Classical music fulfills for me the function of narrative. I spend 90 minutes a day listening to symphonic music - Beethoven to Bartók - some chamber pieces, and that's my enrichment.
Obviously there are pieces of classical music that are some of the most beautiful music ever written, for me anyway is a lot of classical or contemporary music, so it's a different kind of space that you enter when you're listening to it.
With a piece of classical music by Haydn, Mozart, or Beethoven, on first listening I'm referencing it with other pieces by them that I know. I think that most people do this - they listen to pieces through the filter of pieces they already know.
I grew up listening to my parents' albums. Many of them were either classical - Bach, Beethoven and Brahms - or easy listening, like Mantovani. I loved the spectrum of emotions in classical music, from fortissimo to pianissimo. My early passion for classical made my drumming more musical later on.
There is a reactionary conservative side of classical music, which is not the most exciting side of it. The side that draws me in, there's a real encouragement of risk-taking, going back to masters of that tradition like Beethoven and Bartok and Stravinsky.
My father was able to play a number of musical instruments and I fell in love with classical music in my teens and I allowed it to influence me. I like to think I took and still do from classical music and various techniques, I have made classical albums and recorded seven different pieces of Bach on different albums and its all music too me.
I grew up on Bach and Beethoven, and now I'm listening to more modern composers who I can't even name. But since I'm constantly doing music, it's difficult to have that quality time to listen to music and do classical stuff.
My training in music has been very eclectic - as first a flute player from classical chamber music to jazz, Greek, Brazilian and African music to contemporary concert music.
Anyone who knows classical music and loves classical music has heard the Beethoven Seventh hundreds of times probably in their life.
I grew up on Bach and Beethoven and now I'm listening to more modern composers who I can't even name. But since I'm constantly doing music, it's difficult to have that quality time to listen to music and do classical stuff. That's the only reason I'm thinking of going on.
There's some ambient music that doesn't do anything. I wouldn't say that that's narrative. It is narrative in that it creates a sort of world where nothing happens, where really nothing happens, so you become a different person after hearing eight minutes of exactly the same thing. Yes, I hear music all the time in which one idea is strung together to another idea, and I feel that such music is non-narrative.
The chamber music repertoire is so vast that if one is genuinely curious about music, the art of listening, understanding and responding to a score, the elementary skills and requirements of chamber works are easily applicable to that of any solo playing.
I never listen to music when I am writing. It would be impossible. I listen to Bach in the mornings, mostly choral music; also some Handel, mostly songs and arias; I like Schubert's and Beethoven's chamber music and Sibelius' symphonies; for opera, I listen to Mozart and in recent years Wagner.
I listen to music when I write. I need the musical background. Classical music. I'm behind the times. I'm still with Baroque music, Gregorian chant, the requiems, and with the quartets of Beethoven and Brahms. That is what I need for the climate, for the surroundings, for the landscape: the music.
I have written symphonic poems and chamber music. It is my way of personal expression.
I can spend the day without writing or reading, but I can't spend a day without listening to music. I listen to music on a Walkman; it's from the 19th century, I know.
My teachers said, 'Always keep a Beethoven sonata under your fingers.' I always have. I still play chamber music, and I always play classical.
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