Joanna MacGregor - People Quotes

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The musicians who interest me most are people like Nitin Sawhney, Talvin Singh, Django Bates. They are not just writing music but performing it, recording it, putting tours together and running their own labels. That is what real musicians are, rather than over-publicised specialists.

Joanna MacGregor
I don't really go along with this sense that you sometimes pick up - that is, classical music is superior to everything else. I think classical music is a very great music form, but I can also think of other great music forms. And certainly within each field, you have absolute geniuses operating. Over the years, I've tried to bring together different people from different fields, and I do try to put Bach and Beethoven next to other types of musicians.

Joanna MacGregor
Classical music has struggled to keep up. Unlike any other art form, it keeps on looking backwards all the time. It used to have a real museum culture. Then it went: "Oh my God, what are we going to do? Call for Nigel Kennedy. Quick!" Classical musicians have got to change or die,' she asserts strongly, 'but they just don't know how to. Audiences for classical music have dropped. The old blue rinse audience is dying out, and young people aren't coming in.

Joanna MacGregor
I know I get up people's noses," "Everyone wants to pigeonhole you. Early on in my career I somehow got labelled 'Bach, John Cage and a bit of jazz'. But the fact that I love to play Beethoven, too, really infuriates people. It doesn't fit. They can't make sense of it. The received wisdom is that you can't possibly do all these things without it sounding terrible or crass or just plain wrong.

Joanna MacGregor
You don't rely on a great army of people to spoon-feed you. Today's classical-music world is very self-defeating. I love the fact that all these corporations are falling apart. They're sinking millions into acts and getting it wrong. And I know why - it's not about the music, or the audiences. So in many ways this is a very encouraging time.

Joanna MacGregor
I got my apprenticeship, with the Young Concert Artists Trust, playing all these warhorses in Raymond Gubbay concerts. Some are not for me anymore, but I'd still play the Grieg at the drop of a hat; it's so fresh. I'm very careful to keep on playing a lot of mainstream repertoire. I'm not into being the court jester who just does the wacky stuff. Making the connections and taking people down new paths is what I enjoy.

Joanna MacGregor
I have absolutely no difficulty in coming out and saying Bach and Beethoven are great composers. You must school young people into great classical music, but you must also allow them to hear other music as well. At one point classical music colonised the high ground. Now we're reaping the backlash for that.

Joanna MacGregor
I wasn't part of that hothouse thing. I didn't go to the Yehudi Menuhin school. I grew up with the idea of trying to make music available to people of all abilities. The Guardian - 26/05/2000

Joanna MacGregor
In a lot of classical playing there isn't much expressiveness: I don't hear a voice in the playing. What I really admire about jazz musicians is that they develop a sound early on and it's unique to them. Classical players are screened from that by always playing other people's notes.

Joanna MacGregor
A lot of musicians are going to have to retrain. It's nonsense to say that traditional classical music is more complex. Contemporary pieces by Harrison Birtwistle are much harder to play than Mozart or Wagner. I know a lot of people don't want to hear that.

Joanna MacGregor
We're really not very good about putting music in a social and political context, particularly classical music. It's all sort of above everything. But in South Africa, everything is politicised. You play a piece of classical music out there and you are making a real cultural statement. Or you play with a marimba band and you are saying something else. I think that's the way things should be. The way people write about music makes it seem completely devoid of social context. And audiences drift away as a result.

Joanna MacGregor