Top 36 Quartets Quotes & Sayings

I cannot work and listen to Wagner at the same time, nor Mahler, nor Beethoven's late quartets. I enjoy listening to Chopin's piano music when I work.

There are no more barbershop quartets wearing boaters, even though I still like them. Life goes on.

Shostakovich's final pieces, his quartets, are scratching the surface of another world.

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

These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat.

Many consider that Shostakovich is the greatest 20th-century composer. In his 15 symphonies, 15 quartets, and in other works he demonstrated mastery of the largest and most challenging forms with music of great emotional power and technical invention...All his works are marked by emotional extremes - tragic intensity, grotesque and bizarre wit, humour, parody, and savage sarcasm.

It seems to me the structure of the Quartets is too imposed.

We built a bit of an audience at our university in Cambridge, playing Beethoven and Mozart quartets.

I don't know that I make a big distinction between the big pieces and the little pieces, because I don't experience them in that way. I mean, by the same token, you're out touring with a band and then you're writing string quartets, and in a funny way, isn't it all the same, in a way? It's all just music.

I would say that Beethoven's late string quartets are the nearest to God that we'll ever get.

I went out on the road when I was 12 years old, playing with the Sullivan Family Gospel Singers. That was the summer of 1972. We played Pentecostal churches, camp meetings, George Wallace campaign rallies and bluegrass festivals. As a kid, I had grown up watching quartets that were very entertaining.

In his late quartets, Beethoven introduces an element that shouldn't be there, that should be left for meditation, though I love them. I can see that through them came Wagner and Mahler and Schoenberg and Berg. And then came Tracey Emin. And I can see it all as one downward path.

My dad did a wonderful feat of memory and storytelling by taking T S Eliot's 'Four Quartets' on the road in a one-man show.

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.

[Art] would have helped us survive in the Pleistocene - in the period, say, 1.6 million years ago until fairly recently. The kind of imaginative abilities that artists have and that we all have in the appreciation of art - to appreciate Jane Austen, the late quartets of Beethoven.

Part of me is probably more conservative than people realise. I like my old string quartets, I don't like music that's trippy for trippy's sake.

My grandmother got me recordings of the 'Goldberg Variations,' in addition to the 'Brandenburg Concertos,' the Mozart string quartets and Beethoven's 'Seventh Symphony.'

I tried to resist his overtures, but he plied me with symphonies, quartets, chamber music, and cantatas.

I realized very early that I was never going to make by living by writing string quartets. But I wanted to write music and I didn't want to have to do anything else.

My wife and I just started listening to the late Beethoven Quartets together, an activity I recommend for all married couples, but that doesn't really mean that I'm finished reading.

I gathered that those two Big-shot Boys, Joe + Fletcher, just was afraid to let me sing, thinking maybe I'd sort of ruin their reputations with their musical public. They not knowing that I had been singing all of my life. In churches, etc. I had one of the finest All Boys Quartets that ever walked the streets of New Orleans.

I grew up listening to the quartets and I loved that so much that I wanted to see if I could make music and make it happen. It was just a series of events ... me going to concerts and saying "I think I can do that".

Beethoven's last quartets were written by a deaf man and should only be listened to by a deaf man.

The pieces that have survived, the ones that we all love, were not all popular in their time. Just look at Beethoven's late string quartets. The music that the musical community selects, however, is usually the very best.

Beethoven's string quartets express pain itself; it is not MY pain.

On the night of Brexit, while some people were celebrating and others were having wakes, I stayed in and played Beethoven, his quartets mainly, into the small hours of the morning.

I love to write quartets. One could say that this is a mania.

There was one thing Beethoven didn't do. When one of his string quartets was played, you can believe the second violin wasn't improvising.

While I'm working, I stick with music that won't distract me - the dub stylings of Scientist and King Tubby, maybe some Beethoven string quartets.

The Quartets have been a major part of my work.

Why should a novelist not also be a historian? To force unnatural divisions within the English language is to work against its capacious and accommodating nature. To expect a writer to produce only novels, or only histories, is equivalent to demanding from a composer that he or she write only string quartets or piano sonatas.

The great thing about string quartets is the players are kind of like family. They work really well as a unit, so you can write things that let them use those talents of association and intuition-all the things they’ve developed together as a group.

I love Bach cello suites, I love punk music, I love old blues, negro spiritual quartets, Muddy Waters' 'You Need Love.' There is a simplicity but also a bite that connects all that music, from the growl in the cello to the timbre in Muddy's voice.

The fascination with the music stayed with me for years and I wanted to find out why I liked it so much and to learn the grammar of it, and that's why I tried to write the sheet music down. Writing it down gave me some ideas of other versions of the music and I wrote the first string quartets and piano pieces based on transcriptions.

As an improviser I'm now pretty comfortable with trios, so I'm thinking of working up to quartets.

We used to play the underground clubs like the UFO, and Middle Earth, and they were great because they would have on things like a poet, string quartets, and then a rock band! It was kinda cool!