20th-century Violinist Quotes

Jascha Heifetz

Yo-Yo Ma

David Oistrakh

Alexander Rybak

Tony Conrad

Hilary Hahn

Sarah Chang

Now this is very funny because my brother's name is Michael Chang, I go in for interviews or just talk to people and they say, "so what does your brother do?" I say he plays tennis and they automatically assume that he is Michael Chang, the tennis player, and I don't say anything.

He once told a reporter he wanted his obituary to be short - "just make it born in Russia, first lesson at 3, debut at 7, debut in America in 1917".

When I get those really intense moments it doesn't feel like it's the violin that's giving them to me, it's like I'm in touch with some realm of consciousness which is much bigger than I am... It's the music which takes over.

People who carry a musical soul about them are, I think, more receptive than others. They smile more readily. One feels in them a pleasant propensity toward the lesser sins, a pleasing readiness also to admit the possibility that on occasion they may be in the wrong--they may be mistaken.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

I was three and a half years old when my father brought home a toy fiddle," playing "with which I am very happy fancies himself a street musician... I thought not and could not be happier than go from house to house with a violin ".

Don t promise me forever, just love me day by day.

Alexander Rybak

I figured out that my passion is not really for music. My passion is actually for people. So the exploration into different musics of different times has to do with trying to figure out who these people are, what this music represents and what context do we want to give it and what does it mean to us right now.

What do I really want to do, and what will help me continue to be creative, and what will lead me towards being the artist that I want to be in the end.

A specialist is someone who does everything else worse.

It's not too difficult to find a string player who really sings on his instrument, but it's very rare to find a string player who speaks on his instrument.

Well, if you take a roll of film and instead of making pictures on it, you process it by pickling it in vinegar and putting it in a jar and presenting it for people to look at that way, projected through the lens of the fluid around it, this is so distorted and such a monstrous disfigurement of the normal way in which you are 'supposed to use' film, that it is a kind of pathology; it's a sickness in the sense of a virus being inserted in the system. I think wellness and change are measured by comparison to potential for extremes of illness or death. I was trying to kill film. I wanted to let it lay over and die.

The record producer is the music world's equivalent of a film director.