Top 91 Quartet Quotes & Sayings

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'm the fifth generation of Seventh Day Adventists and the youngest of four brothers. When I was still very small, we formed a gospel quartet.

Industry, economy, honesty, and kindness form a quartet of virtues that will never be improved upon.

A world without tomatoes is like a string quartet without violins.

When I heard Monk in person in 1955, he was playing with a quartet in a small club. The place was full of musicians, but there was no public at all.

I prefer a quartet, it makes everyone work harder.

A good quartet is like a good conversation among friends interacting to each other's ideas.

There is no bad day that can’t be overcome by listening to a barbershop quartet. This is just truth, plain and simple.

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.

Whether it's performing a concert with my quartet or sitting in with my peers, enjoying musical conversations at home with my brothers or hanging and playing choro with my friends - sharing moments in that bright space of music are the happiest times.

You hear it in your brain. Whatever makes sense. Some songs work well as quartet songs, sometimes they don't.

Industry, economy, honesty and kindness form a quartet of virtue that will never be improved upon.

My first strong musical memory is of the Villa-Lobos Sixth Quartet which my parents were rehearsing. I remember that it reminded me of big teddy bears dancing around.

The only reason is that I hadn't seen The Modern Jazz Quartet perform live and a live performance is often where the real experience of jazz takes place. I'm not familiar with the Boswell Sisters.

We used to get on planes, and they'd ask who we were, and we'd say, 'The Dave Brubeck Quartet', and they'd say, 'Who?' In later years they'd say, 'Oh', which amounts to the same thing.

People whose sensibility is destroyed by music in trains, airports, lifts, cannot concentrate on a Beethoven Quartet.

Growing up in the Bay Area, I played early on with these quartet groups who set guidelines for me. I remember the guys would all have the same clothes and shoes, like these uniforms. I was in awe.

I've been saying for almost 20 years that I need to do a jazz project and it ought to be either big band or I should do some jazz songs with a trio or 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.

When I was seven years old, I was leading a quartet and trio, and that really laid the groundwork for me as a musician.

The question who ought to be boss is like who ought to be the tenor in the quartet? Obviously, the man who can sing tunor.

And over the last ten years, after my work with the Brodsky Quartet, I had the opportunity to write arrangements for chamber group, chamber orchestra, jazz orchestra, symphony orchestra even.

[David] Bowie's last album "Blackstar" featured him backed by a jazz quartet.

The most perfect expression of human behavior is a string quartet.

My grandma is very musical and can play piano by ear, and my grandpa was in a quartet in Kentucky.

Once a month I play with a chamber music quartet. I play almost no solo music anymore because I so enjoy the interaction. The members of my quartet have become some of my best friends and so I really enjoy it now in ways that I didn't before.

Reading to kids is to ordinary reading what jazz is to a string quartet.

My dad used to sing in a quartet. He loved everything: adult contemporary, anything smooth. He'd listen to the quartets.

I know of musicians who have played together for decades who hate each other. The Modern Jazz Quartet for one.

My first album didn't come out until I was 27, which in pop years is late, you know. But when it came time to arrange it, I became a kid in a toy shop. I had a harp and a saxophone quartet and a symphony orchestra. I went berserk for a time.

How could a New Yorker possibly take something called the Hollywood String Quartet seriously?

I would like to hear Elliot Carter's Fourth String Quartet, if only to discover what a cranky prostate does to one's polyphony.

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.

You can play Bach on the piano, a symphony orchestra or a quartet of saxophones, but let's stop this silly, childish business of knit your own musicology

I didn't have to inspire John toward the avant-garde; he did not need anything from me. That is why it's so interesting that critics decided to dislike me. At some point the members of the quartet felt it was time for a change, and left on their own.

A noble space, unlike any other of our time, for it is both strong and delicate. It seems to call at once for a Boeing 747 and for a string quartet.

Every small town has its dramatic group, its barber-shop quartet, every home has music in one form or another.

'Shantaram' is the second in the series of a quartet of novels that I have planned about my life but is the first to be written. The third book is a sequel to 'Shantaram,' the first a prequel.

I got a chance to listen to and watch Thelonious Monk and his quartet play two shows a night, for six weeks. It was a great education. There was my university, man.

My grandmother would sing in the choir, while my dad - while he was in college - sang and recorded with a quartet. So yeah, it was definitely my dad's Southern side that impacted on me musically.

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.

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!

I would give my best quartet for a good razor.

I love working with the quartet. I have more freedom and flexibility.

Just as with the quartet, each part of a painting is telling a different story.

The Detroit String Quartet played Brahms last night. Brahms lost.

My family was very encouraging, and both of my grandparents were both beautiful singers. My grandmother was a coloratura soprano, and my grandfather was an Irish tenor in a barbershop quartet.

Shantaram is the second in the series of a quartet of novels that I have planned about my life but is the first to be written. The third book is a sequel to Shantaram, the first a prequel.

My great hero is Billie Holiday, and I've always wanted to do an album of standards with a piano-led quartet.

My brothers and I had a gospel quartet, and that was the only music people listened to. But I was already gravitating towards songs by Sam Cooke, and then one day I put on a Jackie Wilson record, and baby, I was thrown right out of the house.

I do know that on my mom's side, my uncle sang and had a gospel group. He also had a radio show he would do on Sundays with his quartet.

I'll tell you what I would do in a shot if I could. I would sing in the barbershop quartet in The Music Man.

The first time I heard a professional jazz quartet practicing in a house down the street it was almost like an out-of-body experience.

Santa Monica, where I have always lived, is not a town where you will find storefront Church of God in Christ churches. So, the whole idea of gospel quartet singing is something I never knew existed until I began to hear it on record.

My grandfather was in a barbershop quartet and my grandmother was in a gospel quartet with her sisters.

I much rather coach a string quartet in an interpretation of Haydn or Beethoven than to teach the guitar.

A Beethoven string-quartet is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses' tails on cats' bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms; but the application of this description in no way precludes the simultaneous applicability of an entirely different description.

The Vores Third Quartet is a terrific piece that brings disparate components into harmony. . . it's celebratory, imaginative, touching, and fun.

Music just runs in my family. My dad and my uncles are a gospel quartet, Latimore Brothers. They've been doing their thing ever since I was a kid, so I just kind of grew up around that.