Piano Quotes by Helmut Walcha, Gyorgy Ligeti, Rashida Jones, Frank Sinatra, Vladimir Horowitz, Milton H. Erickson and many others.
Bach opens a vista to the universe. After experiencing him, people feel there is meaning to life after all.
However, I began composing as soon as I started taking piano lessons.
My activities tend to revolve around crossword puzzles, reading and playing piano and games with my friends.
My father had a piano that was a nickelodeon – put a nickel, and the roller would play.
Piano playing consists of common sense, heart and technical resources. All three should be equally developed. Without common sense you are a fiasco, without technique an amateur, without heart a machine. The profession does have its hazards.
You can’t learn to swim on a piano bench.
If I get frustrated, the first thing I’ll do is get up from the piano – completely mindlessly – and walk over to the cupboard and pull out something salty to eat.
There are certain times when I feel more inspired, filled with a strong power that forces me to listen to my inner voice, and when I feel more need than ever for a Pleyel piano.
I’ve never really been interested in doing a solo piano tour.
It’s all very well having a great pianist playing but it’s no good if you haven’t got anyone to get the piano on the stage in the first place, otherwise the pianist would be standing there with no bloody piano to play.
And that’s what got me to the piano, that’s what got me up in the morning: a blank piece of paper and a hope to have something by the end of the day.
I have damaged nerve endings on the right side, so my piano style comes from designing stuff I can play with my right hand. And some of it effectively mimics classical stuff.
I always make sure that the lid over the keyboard is open before I start to play.
Discipline, strictly speaking, is activity carried on to prepare us indirectly for some activity other than itself. We do not practice the piano to practice the piano well, but to play it well.
Any professional knows that the flute and the piano is a boring combination. All you’ve got to arrive at is a kind of typical gestural crap, right? You might agree, though you wouldn’t call it gestural crap.
Here in New Orleans, what a lot of the musical families do – and this is a romantic concept on my part – is they teach their kids to tap dance first. Then after tap dance, you learn piano, and after piano, you get to pick between all the instruments that are out there.
Music is something I couldn’t live without. My dad was into music, he played for pleasure – guitar, piano. I started off doing jazz, singing with a lot of fabulous musicians here in London before I went to the States. And I still take piano lessons every Wednesday.
I’ve been touching instruments since the day I was born. My mother is Brazilian, and she listens to Brazilian music. My father was a musician, and I’ve seen pictures of him when he was in a band playing guitar and piano. He loved country music, Frank Sinatra, and stuff like that.
I remember listening to Miles Davis in the car with my dad. I had just done my Grade 5 piano exam, and I was quite cocky. I said, ‘It sounds like he’s played the wrong note there.’ I remember the look of horror on my dad’s face, and thinking, ‘Wow, I have to figure out why that is not acceptable.’
You know, when I was younger I was into all kinds of art – drawing, painting, all that stuff. But I played drums, played piano forever.
Music was my first love, and at Marlborough we put bands together and sang the pop songs of the day. Although I couldn’t read or write music – I still can’t – I taught myself to play the guitar and piano by listening to songs and working out the chords.
I met my wife when we were both 19 or 20, at a music school where she was taking voice and piano lessons and I was doing classes in music theory and composition.
In my world, before I knew about Eddie Van Halen, I was playing piano, and at that point in my teenage life, I thought he was just a guitar player.
I left Northwestern University after a year and was in New York playing piano in a little bar on 58th Street, and I didn’t know whether to go back.
In my bachelor days, I had a small upright piano in my kitchen. It cost ВЈ10 from eBay plus ВЈ70 delivery. It was because I’d seen an old photo of Tom Waits – with dirty dishes, empty bottles, a hot plate, a coffee machine and a piano strewn with lyric sheets – and fallen in love with it.
To master the piano is to master the universe.
I play any piano with a good tune.
I’m really interested in trying to learn how to play the guitar since I’ve got two of them! I can kind of mess around on the piano, but I’m going to start learning how to play the guitar.
I always come back to the piano. It’s like home.
My sister played the piano. She’s two years older than me, and I always wanted to play something. So my grandmother got the guitar for me, and showed me a couple of chords to start off. And then I got me a book. Next thing you know, I was playing along with sister.
I sat on the piano bench next to my mother in church. Something happened before I set foot on this planet. I was crawling around inside of her. She was a church pianist. My dad was a brilliant singer. I was hearing it.
With the piano I’m completely in control of the gestural situation-not that I’m going to play the piece myself, but I know what’s difficult, what’s impossible.
My house was filled with music. We had a piano, and my brothers and sisters played instruments. Even though I was around it, I played basketball.
Having photographs around the house is fine – if they’re royal and on the grand piano.
Every day a piano doesn’t fall on my head is good luck.
When I wake up in the morning, and I go to the piano, and there’s a blank sheet of paper in front of me, by the end of the day, that could be a gold mine. You really do need to wake up and expect that the world is your oyster because it very well may be.
Men love watches with multiple functions. My husband has one that is a combination address book, telescope and piano.
Man, after all my grandma put into me learning the piano, that was a hard day, telling her I was telling jokes for a living.
Everyone can write their melodies and chords and pianos and guitars, but what hasn’t been discovered yet are tones and textures, and that’s very exciting. Probably the No. 1 most important thing in my music is not to sound like anyone else.
Many people have asked me why there are three pedals in these grand pianos. Well the pedal in the middle is there to separate the two other pedals.
If I stopped writing and being at my piano, I wouldn’t know how to live. It’s your best friend.
However, it [singing] wasn’t until halfway through high school that it dawned on me that singing wasn’t just a hobby, it was something I had a growing need for in my life, and that was about when I adopted the neglected guitar I found under our piano and started singing about all the things I could never say.
I always just sit down at the piano and make the main hook—what I want the track to be about melodically—and then I’ll build everything else around that. But growing up, I did not play any instruments.
I’d studied piano first and switched over to cello when I was about seven. I played mostly chamber and solo classical music. I got really involved with rock music when I was a teenager. I wired up my cello.
I always loved the guitar, from when I was quite little. My dad had a G banjo at the house that he played. When he had parties, my sisters always played piano, and my dad played banjo.
Music is the medicine of the breaking heart.
Karl Johnson, my first piano player at Milt Trenier’s, he just swung really hard and gave me a sense of really belonging to the jazz scene.
We get along, we talk music.Lenny Kravitz took me to Harlem to see this little jazz show in the back of a church. It was just shitty fluorescent lights and a small stage piano, but this band tore it up.
When I’m not touring, I sing at home, either at the piano or I’ll pick up my guitar, singing old Buck Owens songs.
I took piano and drum lessons when I was young, and took a lot of choir classes in high school. Beyond that I just play by ear and learn as I go.
I loved Queen, Journey, Fleetwood Mac, and people like Barbara Streisand. The thing with me is that classical music was also an inspiration. I took piano lessons at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels for 10 years.
If you’re stuck at piano and you’re not a lead guitarist or a lead vocalist, you’re kind of at a nine-foot plank then and you should do something about it.
My favorite sound is definitely mules. If it was an instrument, it’s really pingthe touch of the black keys of the piano.
very bright teeth as big and orderly as piano keys.
A smart girl is one who knows how to play tennis, golf, piano — and dumb.
I started playing piano with a little band in high school. I was terrible. I thought I had absolutely no talent. I couldn’t keep time. I only got into McGill, which was a lousy music school, because they were taking American music students.
My big influences are piano artists like Billy Joel and Elton John.
You think it matters to the kids whether they’re learning to play on a Steinway or a normal piano?
I normally write on acoustic guitar, although piano is the instrument that I actually studied. Occasionally, I’ll write on the piano or sometimes with no instrument at all.
I don’t like the piano player music of the movies, the Michael Nyman, and sometimes that piano music makes me puke. It’s not really romantic. It’s just trying to get your Pavlovian juices flowing because it’s a technique now.
I like the powerful story, the excellent performances the beautiful cinematography and the vision of the “The Piano”.
The way ‘Lux’ was made is that there are 12 sections in here, though two of them are joined together. So there are really 11 sections, in a sense, and each one uses five notes out of a palette of seven notes, and my palette is all the white notes on the piano. That was the original palette.
I give them the head, choke them, hit them in the balls.You’rehting, not playing the piano, you know
Nothing soothes me more after a long and maddening course of pianoforte recitals than to sit and have my teeth drilled.
Truly to sing, that is a different breath.
Writing is like giving birth to a piano sideways. Anyone who perseveres is either talented or nuts.
I’ve written lots of songs on the piano. My mother had a piano and it was the first instrument I played
If you write a song, and you go into a restaurant, and there’s a guy with a piano singing and he’s playing piano, singing your song, or you hear it at a wedding or at an airport… it’s fun!
I wish I could play the piano. I started when I was four and finished when I was five. I got bored. I couldn’t tell my left hand from my right back then!
When a little more than a teenager, I was a piano-bar pianist in the land where I was born and raised, Tuscany.
My brother and I grew up in a musical family. We have an older sister who sings and plays the piano. Our dad is a musician. Music was always a part of our lives.
I had 12 years of classical music as a child, playing piano competitions as a teenager, playing in blues bands and rock ‘n’ roll bands, country and jazz bands. I played in about any situation.
The mark of genius is consistency. Do we hear of naive genius piano players? If anyone knows of one, try listening to it for an hour.
Ive heard some people say that Im selling out, but Im not. If I hadnt done Black Radio, and just kept on doing just piano trio stuff, I wouldnt be honest with myself; Id be doing it to please other people. That would be selling out.
My grandfather, Arthur Baskerville, he played and still plays a little bit piano and trombone, and so when I was a kid, I always heard jazz around the house, but I also went to his gigs, whether it be a Saturday brunch in my hometown Columbus, Ohio. We’d go and hear him play with some of the local musicians.
A lot of people can play the piano, but not everyone can be Billy Joel.
There are three things on my piano – my Best Villainess award, my Grammy, and my Rock N’ Roll Hall Of Fame statue.
He’s a seminal force, a guru, an original creator of the New Orleans piano style.. the teacher of great players like Fats Domino, Allen Toussaint, Mac Rebenack, James Booker, and Huey Smith. All acknowledge him as The Great Master.
Your body is merely a machine made to express the thoughts that flow through you and nothing more. It is but an instrument for you to express your imagings just as a piano is an instrument for a musician to express his imagings. Just as the piano is not the musician, so, likewise, your body is not you.
I’m quite proud of my piano playing. Robin’s never played a note on the piano at our recording sessions. I just wish I could be appreciated musically now.
They teach real young kids and when I was about five my Mom took me to enroll in this thing and they said I could do it. It was definitely my choice, but I would have never thought of it. There’s pictures of me playing piano when I’m real, real little, that kind of stuff.
The first reason why I started to use the [electric] keyboard is because I really like the bending sound of the guitar and bass player. I can’t bend the piano sound. I really like the feel behind it. I feel it adds flavour and character to my music.
In my life, my parents wanted me to be a musician, I was supposed to go to Vienna to study piano. But this train wanted to go in another direction.
I draw and play the piano badly. But when I’m doing those things, I’m concentrating so hard there’s no room for worry. I find that onstage, too.
I didn’t even start playing the piano until I was about 13 or 14. I guess I must have had a little talent or whatever-you-call-it, but I practised regularly, and that’s what counts.
Love is like playing the piano. First you must learn to play by the rules, then you must forget the rules and play from your heart. If I were pressed to say why I loved him, I feel that my only reply could be: Because it was he, because it was I.
‘The Piano’ is a romantic drama that really made me want to see New Zealand. When I finally did it was every bit as jaw dropping as it looked in the film. It’s so virgin and green, it’s like God said ‘lets try again’ and he got it right this time!
‘The Piano Lesson’ is very sophisticated, easily the most adult or complex material I’ve attempted. It’s the first film I’ve written that has a proper story, and it was a big struggle for me to write. It meant I had to admit the power of narrative.
I don’t think there’s any danger of me playing Indian music. However, I did a song of George Harrison’s ‘Beware of Darkness’ that was kind of like that. That was an illusion. I was playing that on a thumbtack piano, and Jim Gordon was playing tablas. He’s an amazing player. That was as close to India as I ever got.
Now, guitar was pretty cool. Everybody knew something on the guitar. So I wanted to play guitar, but I told my dad if he wanted me to keep studying something, I’d like to study piano.
God gave me a gift of singing and playing the piano, and when I do it, it’s exciting, of course. But it’s more than that. It’s truly the way God created me to release my soul and my spirit, to really worship him. … I’m made to create music.
The piano is like an orchestra – I’m very fortunate that I chose it as my instrument.
My aunt took me to see ‘Salad Days’ when I was seven. This story of a magic piano that infects everyone who hears it infected me, too. It was a Road to Damascus moment in my life.
I can’t read or write music. When I want to remember something, I try to remember all the keys on the piano. Which is what I still do. I put the numbers on the keys. And that’s got to become music again.
I can remember sitting at the piano. My sister was playing, and my brother was singing something, and I said, ‘I want to try that.’
I always sang when I was little and my father, who was a great influence on me, also had a wonderful voice. He and my mother really encouraged me to sing and play the piano. They were always very supportive.
As a producer, when I’m trying to make something soft, I start with a slow tempo. Then after that, it would be straight to acoustic guitar and vocals, or I’m going to go strings and just piano.
I started playing piano; I picked up a ukulele, and I loved it and kept playing that. I play a bit of guitar, and some African drums from back in the day.
I certainly miss playing piano, and I really wish I did it more – it’s really a very therapeutic thing to do for me. I just need to be home for more than a few minutes to be able to play more, I guess.
I consider myself very fortunate. I mean, I think there’s that old saying, ‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way,’ and I just have such a passion for jazz music and playing the piano that I just find a way to make it work, so to speak. Fortunately, I have so far.
I have looked to the Steinway piano since I was three, not only as my ideal choice of an instrument. But, as a responsive and ever reliable friend.
I’ve never been in love. I’ve dreamt of it day and night, but my heart is like a fine piano no one can play because the key is lost.
Those edges and turns teach control and discipline, just like finger exercises on the piano.
I grew up hard. I picked cotton and plowed with the mule and fixed the cars and played with the guitar and the piano.
I’m sorry to say that no, I do not play the piano.
Every time I’d sing or play piano when I was a child, my dad would yell up from the basement, ‘That’s B-flat!’
For a female artist, it takes a lot more to be taken seriously if you’re not sat down at a piano or with a guitar, you know?
The most influential time in my life musically was definitely those piano lessons.
Music can noble hints impart, Engender fury, kindle love, With unsuspected eloquence can move, And manage all the man with secret art.
Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.
Not everybody has a talent for painting, or for the piano, or for dance. But we can write our way into the artist’s head and into his problems and solutions. Or we can go there with another writer.
I taught myself to play the piano, because I wanted to play it.
My Dad played the trombone and I think my Mom played the piano for about two years. It is very self-driven. They pushed me to do piano lessons, but they were never forceful about anything. They never pushed me to sing or anything, it was something that I did myself.
It has to be ‘The Piano’ by Jane Campion. It inspired me to pursue my dream to direct. It is not just my favorite woman-directed film – it is my favorite film.
All my writing, I always do it in the studio, ’cause everything sounds good. The piano’s there, the keyboards; if you want to put strings on something… And everything sounds good when it’s in the cans; it sounds killer.
I like to listen to a lot of classical music when I’m painting, the most simplistic stuff I can find. I like simple piano.
Avicii’s melodies were so simple and cool, and they were actually similar to the melodies I played on piano. I thought if I could teach myself how to produce and get those melodies out of my head and into the computer, maybe I could make some cool music, too.
If it’s fast, no I don’t have enough piano technique. In that case, it’s probably been done on some kind of synthesizer or sequencer. Then the score can then be printed out and so forth.
The more we sense…our ultimate potential, the more determined we become to achieve it. It’s the difference between your mother hounding you to practice the piano and reaching the point where you want to do it yourself. You simply will not be denied the ultimate reward and the joy of the Big Finish. p 90
I was always a happy kid. I’d play the piano fairly well. I did all sorts of things fairly well. But who the hell wants to be happy all the time? It’s a miserable state to be in permanently. Can you imagine how dreary that would be?
I set up this little office space with a piano in it and I thought that would be quite a novel way of writing the album, to make it like a job – a romanticised version of the 9 to 5. I think that was probably my favourite time. I made sure I walked there every day, which took me about an hour.
I started playing piano when I was 6, ukulele at 7.
The thing that got me through the worst of my teen years was running and the piano.
Any professional knows that the flute and the piano is a boring combination. All you’ve got to arrive at is a kind of typical gestural crap, right? You might agree, though you wouldn’t call it gestural crap
I consider a house without books or a piano to be unfurnished.
I always wanted to play some kind of instrument – piano, saxophone, whatever. I took it up for a while, then forgot about it because I didn’t have the time.
I started taking piano lessons when I was 8 and I wrote my first song shortly after. Music was really important in my family. My grandma was a professional violin player and my parents first met when my dad was giving my mom guitar lessons.
The sound and just the fact that it was different from the piano, yet it still had some familiarity [made my fascinated with accordion].
My brother Leon started it all. He played the piano. In school they made me leader of the orchestra because I played the violin, but I followed Leon and the boys in his jazz band around.
My mother was a piano teacher, my father an inventor. He invented the reflective paint they still use on airstrips. They had faith in my ambition, and I think that made all the difference.
You could call my piano my trademark, or one of my trademarks.
Making lyrics feel natural, sit on music in such a way that you don’t feel the effort of the author, so that they shine and bubble and rise and fall, is very, very hard to do. Whereas you can sit at the piano and just play and feel you’re making art.
I play a bunch of instruments, like piano, drums, guitar and bass. And the kazoo every now and then. I’m trying to learn how to play the trumpet and the saxophone. That’s what I’m learning how to play.
Got tight last night on absinthe and did knife tricks. Great success shooting the knife underhand into the piano. The woodworms are so bad and eat hell out of all the furniture that you can always claim the woodworms did it.
I’ve forgotten a lot of things. I’ve forgotten how to play the piano and how to speak Arabic, though I studied it for two years.
Piano playing is more difficult than statesmanship. It is harder to awake emotions in ivory keys than it is in human beings.
I am surprising myself [at] each show, and the delivered piano often surprises me. Sometimes the piano is so old that I don’t have to prepare it, and sometimes I have a concert grand!
I studied piano for seven years and play for my own enjoyment.
I never took guitar lessons. I took classical piano lessons from the age of six when we lived in Holland. And when we moved to America, it was just the typical thing except I was really good at it; so was my brother.
I bet you can’t play slide piano.
The first thing I learned was the ‘St Louis Blues’ when I was eight. Both my grandmothers, my mother and uncle played the piano. This was post-war Britain, and they played boogie woogie and blues, which was the underground music of the time.
I also went to art school and learned to play a piano there, but I play by ear.
I went straight in. Fade in, one… whatever. He’s playing the piano in the radio station.
The music is within your heart, your soul, your spirit, and this is all I did when I sat at piano. I just go within.
Some people are drawn naturally – there are natural guitarists, and there are natural piano players, and I think guitar implies travel, a sort of footloose gypsy existence. You grab your bag and you go to the next town.
I don’t let the children watch TV on weeknights. They practice playing musical instruments instead. Both my sons play piano, drums and guitar, so my husband and I listen to them in the evening.
I’m somebody who plays the piano… sometimes.
In a way, there’s nothing wrong with playing the piano, but it’s not a huge trauma if you don’t.
Quoting Demosthenes, ‘For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.’ I would rather make money playing a piano in a whorehouse than arguing that no cost is incurred when employees are paid in stock options instead of cash. I am not kidding.
‘Beneath the Piano’ by The Devil Makes Three somehow reminds me of an old Johnny Cash song. The song is a lot of fun and tells a story.
My downtime tends to resemble my uptime. Weekends are workdays, but toned down. Over the whole weekend, I may have five meetings, as opposed to six on a weekday. I used to play piano for 30 minutes at night, but I had to pull that out of my schedule. I don’t have time for nonwork stuff.
I think, even when I was little, there was signs that I was an artist. I’ve always been an artist. My first exploration through art was really through music – I’ve trained classically with piano for about ten years.
I’m the oldest in my family and do play piano.
If you hear Thelonious Monk play a run that goes from the top of the piano, OK, he has opened up the Grand Canyon with that. He’s the river that’s carved this entire space that we call the Grand Canyon. He does that with one run. He lets you know, like, what the possibility of the sound of the piano can do.
[Thelonious] Monk is a subject in itself. I mean, most piano players in most big bands sit down and they play with the band, you know. But Monk would just sit there like this. And all of a sudden there’d be a pause from all the trumpets and everything and Monk would go ‘plink!’ like that. And everybody would go ‘Yeah!
My mother gave me a choice. She said, ‘Would you like to take singing lessons or piano.’ I’m glad I chose piano.
I didn’t start playing piano until I was 18.
There’s individual turntable setups devoted to piano, bass, drums and a set for soloing as well. We like to try and explore the gamut of what a turntable can do.
I had a great childhood. Even though I never had my own room – I shared the porch with my grandfather and kept my belongings in one drawer of a dresser that was jammed next to the piano – I never went hungry and was always supported by my family.
I wouldn’t be able to act like Al Pacino or play the piano like Dr. John, But I could probably act better than Dr. John and play the piano better than Al Pacino.
I didn’t have bands that I was playing with growing up, so I learned to try to adapt and play these songs that were guitar songs on the piano, and sing them.
I will never, most likely, be good at the piano, but thanks to it, I will never forget the humbling, infuriating, necessary slowness of progress in any artistic endeavor.
Some days I feel like a piano: kind of short, always in black & white, always expected to produce music.
I love the morning time – a cup of coffee and to sit at the piano, that’s probably my favorite time.
If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music.
Because of Billy Joel, I’ve been playing piano since I was knee high. The house was always full of music, so of course he’s influenced me, but I think I’ve also developed my own sound. He’s also been really good about giving me advice, which I think has helped me really stay true to what I want to do musically.
Mother, being a pianist, told me how to play with my fingers on the piano.
The scratches in Yoko Ono records are moments of relief.
I took piano lessons when I was younger and I’ve been trying to learn how to play the guitar recently. I’d really like to learn how to play the drums. They’re a lot of fun and they require a lot of focus.
It’s a magical thing, the guitar. It allows you to be the whole band in one, to play rhythm and melody, sing over the top. And as an instrument for solos, you can bend notes, draw emotional content out of tiny movements, vibratos and tonal things which even a piano can’t do.
I was always involved in the arts from a young age. I started studying classical piano at age four as a student of the Associated Board of the Royal School of Music.
What I would really like to have been, given a perfect world, is a jazz pianist. I mean jazz. I don’t mean rock and roll. I mean the never-the-same-twice music the American black people gave the world.
A lawyer’s relationship to justice and wisdom is on a par with a piano tuner’s relationship to a concert. He neither composes the music, nor interprets it-he merely keeps the machinery running.
I play the guitar and the piano and have a group of guys who I play with. They’re uber talented.
As for my own music, I’ve never written a book about it. I’m not pedagogical… When I write an abstract piano sonata or a concerto, I write what I feel. I’m not a self-conscious composer.
Showing your movie to an audience… it’s like your kid doing a piano recital. ‘Just let it not fail. Please.
I’m really getting better at guitar. I’m not trapped behind a piano. You can get out and move with a guitar and still direct the band.
When I was eight, my piano teacher played seven or eight notes, and I sang them. She stopped and looked at me in shock! That was the first time I’d gotten that reaction. I’d had looks of horror, but never shock in a positive way.
Although I don’t come from a musical background, I was given piano lessons along with my sisters, but I wasn’t what you would call a good student. I tended to write songs rather than do scales.
A review of his work: His music soon spread throughout Europe, and he was invited to America were he performed the Piano Concerto. He would have wished that he would be remembered as an opera composer, but it was to be his orchestral extravaganzas, mainly the trilogy of Roman pictures that has made his name famous.
You’re a master on blues piano. The real deal.
The way it works: The orchestra plays a few selections of its own and I terminate the first part of the programme on piano, usually with a movement from a Mozart concerto.
Kylie and I were both taking piano lessons at the time and didn’t think of acting. A friend rang mum up and said, ‘How about bringing Kylie and Danielle in because they might be right for the part?’
I took piano for many years. I kicked and screamed through all of my lessons, but my mom really insisted.
When I was a kid I’d practise Chopin on piano – and I love Chopin! He’s my dawg! Then I’d go out on the stoop and blast the radio. I’m from New York, the concrete jungle. Hip-hop influenced me from day one.
My work on hyper instruments started with simple instruments, like the piano.
Radio, sewing machine, bookends, ironing board and that great big piano lamp – peace, that’s what I like. Butterbean vines planted all along the front where the strings are.
I love playing the piano. I really want to start taking lessons but need to find the time.
I played piano, flute, and guitar.
My own mother, my sister and nearly all the women in my family had full-time jobs as mothers. They were wonderful at it. They drove their children back and forth to soccer, skating lessons, piano lessons, private schools, but I sensed, even in my own mother, a kind of distant dissatisfaction.
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
You have to really concentrate on piano or acting. You can’t do both.
I get nervous when they start shooting piano players.
I play piano and guitar. Acoustic guitar. I tried studying classical guitar when I was 16 but it got really hard. I could never play a lead to save my life.
The commonest fallacy among women is that simply having children makes them a mother – which is as absurd as believing that having a piano makes one a musician.
I play the piano a lot at home. I write songs on the piano and guitar. I would like to actually play piano on stage. I don’t think I’ll get the chance for a while.
If you play the very subtle jazz tunes with acoustic pianos, acoustic bass and it’s a dead standard, you are going to play very differently. It depends on the music.
In rugby there are those who play the piano – and those who shift them
Put a small piano in a truck and drive out on country roads; take time to discover new scenery; stop in a pretty place where there is a good church; upload the piano and tell the residents; give a concert; offer flowers to the people who have been so kind as to attend; leave again.
Music is God’s gift to man, the only art of Heaven given to earth, the only art of earth we take to Heaven.
Steinway is the finest piano ever made. Its tone is magnificent and its well-balanced action superb.
I started studying piano at the age of four.
I tried a little of everything when I was little. I tried karate, I tried ballet, I tried piano lessons and singing lessons… I was a pretty normal kid, for the most part.
I used to play pianos in bars. You know in hotels, you’d see guys playing piano with a snifter? That was me, with a painted-on mustache. I was about 15.
You have those songs that are very special to you that you don’t want to get ruined by production. Something like ‘Start Again’ shouldn’t be touched. It’s a classic-sounding song on a piano and violins and harmonies, and I think those songs are perfect as they are.
My whole trick is to keep the tune well out in front. If I play Tchaikovsky, I play his melodies and skip his spiritual struggle.
I discovered it was easier to carry around a pen than a piano.
When I was very small, the electricity was turned off because we didn’t pay the bill. I remember sitting by the oil lamp listening to my mother playing ‘Careless Love’ on the piano.
I didn’t want my last chapter to be the guy who sits at the piano and sings love songs.
What made me pick up a guitar? It weighed a lot less than a piano.
Got two kids; one’s a record producer who lives just up the road from me – great guitarist and piano player, too.
The piano song that I do in the movie [The Hangover], it’s a great example, that was never – that wasn’t in the script.
For ten years, I went to piano lessons. I don’t think I’m a very musical person, and the theory quite defeated me, but I had a freak aptitude for Debussy and Ravel.
I wanted to take up guitar because playing piano is a little harder. Carrying a keyboard around is harder, and finding a real piano is much harder, and I wanted to play live more, so I figured a guitar would be easier to carry around.
I had this spooky psychological thing about ‘The Piano’ before it began, which was how everybody was going to go nuts on the set. Because a film tends to set up the way people are going to behave.
After the Second World War, I returned to California to study composition with Darius Milhaud, who wrote wonderful works like ‘Le Boeuf sur le Toit’ and ‘La Cretion du Monde.’ I especially enjoy his work for two pianos, ‘Scaramouche.
As a piano player, if 10 is concert level, I’d put myself at a 5 or a 6, but in a completely different genre than classical or opera. In terms of classical and opera, playing accompaniment, I’d say I was a 3.
I would always write lyrics and songs on the piano.
I had, like, a keytar. I was always attracted to the guitar, but I never really thought that I could be good at it because I was trained on piano, so it was kind of a jump.
I can’t play guitar or piano. I can’t even play dumb to get through TSA in the airport.
I had aunts who played piano and sang and also were entertainers, so music was very much a part of my life.
I play as many different things – piano, sax and harp parts – as I can at once. Whatever I can fit, whenever I need to.
I liken movies to playing a piano: Sometimes you’re playing the chords and different notes with unresolved cadences and playing all major chords that are all over the place, and you’re enjoying yourself with a great, simple melody.
My friendship with the Steinway piano is one of the most important and beautiful things in my life.
From an early age I’ve written songs and played the piano.
When I turned the corner, I saw Toni waving at me from the elevator. I think I’ve already told you how it made me feel to see her smile and wave at me. You can have your sunsets and waterfalls. If a piano were to suddenly fall on my head, that’s the image I’d want forever engraved in my mind. —Alton Richard
And of course there’s so much music in and around our family. I had a piano during Christmas because it’s obviously useful through the season. There are so many people, songwriters, who are around.
He had as much fun in the water as any person I have known. You didn’t have to throw a stick in the water to get him to go in. Of course, he would bring back a stick to you if you did throw one in. He would even have brought back a piano if you had thrown one in.
Yeah, I don’t like, um, I’m not interested in rock ‘n’ roll piano. I find it a little grating.
Last year, I finally got my own grand piano, and that was a big thing for me because it’s always been and always will be a very important part of my life.
Are we not formed, as notes of music are,
For one another, though dissimilar?
For one another, though dissimilar?
I came from a really musical family. I studied classical piano because my grandparents were piano teachers, but started doing musical theater at age nine in Fresno, California, and went to a performing arts high school. That was my life.
A lot of the songs are written on piano or guitar, so I contribute, and I have done so since the beginning. So it’s been good to be involved completely musically as well.
Music has always been in my family, but it was mainly keyboards. I learned to play classical piano, but when I first heard the amazing bass guitar of James Jamerson, who played on all the big Motown hits of the ’60s and ’70s, I knew bass guitar was my instrument.
Here I am, a not over-good business man, a second-rate engineer. I can make poor mechanical drawings. I play the piano after a fashion. In fact, I am one of those proverbial Jack-of-all-trades who are usually failures. Why I am not, I can’t tell you.
I identify more as a musician than as a singer, because I play piano and percussion, and I engineer and produce everything that I do.
Outlaws, like lovers, poets, and tubercular composers who cough blood onto piano keys, do their finest work in the slippery rays of the moon.
I can’t play piano like I used to either. I used to have bass rolling like thunder. I can’t do that no more. But I ask the Lord, please forgive me for the stuff I done trying to make a nickel.
My father, I think he played percussion in high school. My mother played piano when she was very young, but only for a brief while. I don’t think she had a great teacher. In any case, neither of them were really into music at a young age.
I’ve always been inspired by female performers and artists who really surround who they are around their voice. For me, it’s always been about the voice. I wanna hear someone just sit by a piano, on a stool, and just sing – and that’s it!
No other acoustic instrument can match the piano’s expressive range, and no electric instrument can match its mystery.
It [piano lessons] wasn’t a priority, but it was an interest and through that I became acquainted with classical music, which was a main interest at the time.
I never use a piano stool. I always use a drum stool. Because I feel that when you’re down there, you’re playing in that way you’re supposed to. I like to be above it.
Adam Berenson knows how to compose, organize an ensemble, do musical research, play solo and trio piano, write for musical journals, and enlist others to his cause. A very fine musician.
If I had spent a quarter of the time that I spent manipulating my sexuality in front of a piano instead, I would be the most gifted piano player of my lifetime.
I play piano, and I was really, really obsessive about playing piano in high school. I don’t know if that’s nerdy, but I definitely locked myself in the room and was playing jazz. I was 14. I guess that’s kind of cool, actually.
Most days, I practice piano in the mornings and I spend the rest of the day painting.
Immediate, simultaneous connection between the audience and a performer is crucial to me. It’s why I do what I do. Other things, like recording, are satisfying, but they’re not the same. I love the connection I get with the audience when I’m sitting behind that piano.
I’ve played drums since I was 15. My sisters and I all played instruments. I kind of started with piano and then I actually played saxophone with a jazz band in middle school. So, any knowledge I had of jazz music was from playing alto-sax back then.
I’m a first – I was the first person in my family born in the United States. My mom is from Croatia, and my dad is from Iran. They met at music school in Belgium. I grew up as a pianist. I was really interested in piano and sort of discovered that I was a writer when I was about 13 and started writing.
Iris, if you were a melody…piano melody. I used only the good notes.
I love playing piano, too, but I don’t sit around doing it all day. Part of that’s because I don’t have one in my house – I only have synths.
I play piano and ukulele, and I taught myself those things just because I wanted to play them.
I spent ten years playing classical piano, and that was what led to keyboards and eventually to production and to Linkin Park.
When I was a little girl my parents always told me do everything you want in an artistic way. If you want to draw, make a drawing. Just do it. And if you want to play piano, play piano. It was a very free childhood where everything was possible.
I find that people can’t find you. It’s kind of quiet. When I go to a city, I can almost always get a piano if I need one. So there’s something nice about being on the road and focusing on something you want to do.
My first big break came with Lauryn Hill on a track called Everything is Everything, I played piano on that track way back in 1998.
I have always liked black and white! It is simple and the colour of the piano.
Reading old travel books or novels set in faraway places, spinning globes, unfolding maps, playing world music, eating in ethnic restaurants, meeting friends in cafes . . . all these things are part of never-ending travel practice, not unlike doing scales on a piano, shooting free-throws, or meditating.
When you sit down and write a song, you kind of have the idea for the song, and you sit there at the piano and you kinda just write it. And then of course later there’s some dinking around with it and changing some stuff.
I wish to thank Steinway for its wonderful pianos which I’ve been privileged to play in all my concerts. There is no piano like it in the world.
I totally related to Cole Porter’s magnetic pull to any piano that was in the room, which he was famous for doing, as was Gershwin. You couldn’t drag them away from a piano.
I’ve been playing my instrument since I was about three or four. That’s when I started banging around on the piano, trying to be like The Beatles.
My son’s taking drum lessons, and my daughter’s taking piano lessons. One day they’re going to start a band.
I never took any kind of vocal lessons or teachings of how to – I never even took piano lessons. And a voice just came to me and said, go play the piano in the church.
The piano is able to communicate the subtlest universal truths by means of wood, metal and vibrating air.
I’ve always loved French music. My parents adored it; my father played it on the piano.
My dad actually taught me how to play piano. I was classically trained, but I’ve started to branch off a little bit into blues and jazz. That’s my new thing.
I’m going to have classical piano lessons next.
I’ve always written songs. I’d come home from school and play piano for hours on end, just banging around.
Frank [Zappa] always wanted to do a sound library – he sampled so many great musicians. For piano, for example, he sampled every octave, not just one (that you could just transpose electronically), and he did all different types of attack, with and without pedals, all that kind of stuff.
It is my aim, my destination in life to make the cello as beloved an instrument as the violin and piano.
I always wrote music for my friends, but my focus was on playing piano. I didn’t think I’d be quite good enough to be a soloist, but I believed that if I worked hard enough, I could work as a player, a teacher.
I have to thank my mother for paying for the piano lessons for all those years.
Of course, if you think of a European or American household in the ’50s, so what were the things that when people started climbing up the ladder, what did they buy? A fridge, a TV, I think piano was the number three item in say ’53 or ’54.
Here look at me. I’m Charlie, the son you wrote off the books? Not that I blame you for it, but here I am, all fixed up better than ever. Test me. Ask me questions. I speak twenty languages, living and dead; I’m a mathematical whiz, and I’m writing a piano concerto that will make them remember me long after I’m gone.
I played, like, a year of piano until I learned the ‘Pink Panther’ theme. That was my goal. Once I was good enough, I quit. Now my music has to have some rock.
Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.
I think Ada in ‘The Piano’ is the most interior character I’ve ever had the chance to play, either on the stage or in anything I’ve done for film or TV.
I really wanted to find a piano for the farm house. There were so many free pianos on Craigslist, I thought, ‘Let’s get as many free pianos as we can and stick them all in the barn.’ I got eight in a short period of time, only six of which were tunable, but it’s still quite funny.
Unlike a high-wire walker, I don’t think any musician strikes the wires of a piano or draws a bow across a violin’s strings primarily for the kick of an adrenalin fix. There is danger on stage, but dropped notes are not broken bones; a memory lapse is not a tumble to the ground.
I sound like a crazy person… but I feel when a piano is happy, and I feel when they find that moment to be alive. I want them to remember me.
I have the soundtrack for ‘A Clockwork Orange,’ which is kind of cool. I guess I don’t really end up buying a lot of modern soundtracks. Another soundtrack I love is from a French movie called ‘Betty Blue.’ it has some really melancholy piano work.
As a young child, I thought that all pianists played everything. I mean, I thought anything on piano – any piano music, all pianists played it.
To say to the painter that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player that he may sit on the piano.
There is nothing like tasting the grit of fear for rediscovering that the umbilical cord is made of piano wire.
My brother Max made my desk. It’s a masterpiece, like a piano. Everybody who comes in my office loves my desk.
I play only classical music. My pianos are my only big indulgence, but they’re a necessity. When I’m playing the piano is literally the only time I can be completely abstract and disconnected from the regular world and yet be connected – to my music.
Sometimes I can only groan, and suffer, and pour out my despair at the piano!
So yeah, I play the piano for most of the show, but I like rock and roll.
We decided to do some of Merle’s things with modern instrumentation. We used a flute, a bass clarinet, a trumpet, a clarinet, drums, a guitar, vibes and a piano.
I have a lot of alter-egos: I would love to be a back-up singer for someone someday. I have an electronic side-project. I have a ’90s grunge side project; I have a piano project… I have this industrial, goth-electronic song, super creepy sounding, just really dark and dreary.
The piano bar is the gateway to the halls of masturbation.
I play the keyboard, piano – I like making beats.
I think I wanted to be a punk-rocker before I wanted to be anything else. I remember wanting a mohawk, and I wanted to cut the sleeves off of my jean jacket because I used to want to be Dirty Dan from Sha-Na-Na. This is before hip-hop was even around. I had the skinny piano tie. I had it, man.
I grew up taking piano lessons and liking Wagner when I was in second grade.
Second edition of Earthworks I have the more traditional compositional approach, namely I write a piece from the piano.
Every day I lugged my backpack through the halls, waiting for the final bell. Then I’d race home and hole up in my room, playing the drums and the piano, composing music.
I remember when I finally figured out how simple one aspect of singing was, and I looked at my voice teacher and I said, is that all it is? And he put his head on the piano keys, and he said, why do I do this to myself?
Some homes need a hickory switch a good deal more than they do a piano.
But do you know how old I will be by the time I learn to really play the piano / act / paint / write a decent play?” Yes . . . the same age you will be if you don’t.
Touch me вЂtil my ribs become piano keys, вЂtil there is sheet music scrolled across the inside of my lungs.
I was obliged to play the piano, like middle-class children are. I didn’t start to love it until I was 14.
And I definitely have an affinity with the piano.
At one point I had dreams of being in the school band, but I didn’t play an instrument that qualified me, and that was a problem. I always had fantasies to be part of that, but I did take my piano lessons quite seriously.
I played piano back in my elementary school days and I sang a cappella back in college.
Play the Piano Drunk Like a Percussion Instrument Until the Fingers Begin to Bleed a Bit.
Miss Petrowska,an excellent pianist, held the audience transfixed with Chou Wen-chung’s work. Miss Petrowska was coolness itself in getting the hardware into the piano and out again…in Messiaen, a feeling for the music’s reverent sobriety combined to produce an absorbing performance.
Conducting has more to do with singing and breathing than with piano-playing.
My family is very musical, I was surrounded by it. And from four years old I was the one that asked my mother could I take piano lessons.
I’m not really a piano player, but I play enough to get away with it.
You can’t be different if you look at it. Being gifted is different. I had that in my piano playing. I’m very thankful for that. I’m very aware of that. The style and what I fed is just me. I never worked at it. It just happened.
A couple of my friends had guitars, and I remember messing with them, but I was often intimidated by it. I think I sat down at a piano once when I was really young, but that was it.
Mom and sister played piano growing up; my grandma still plays piano in church. They always beat me over the head trying to get me to play piano, but I was more interested in riding dirt bikes and playing in the mud.
I have always studied my parts with the orchestral score and not with the piano reduction.
I started playing the piano, pretty much on my own, when I was 5, and I started writing music when I was 7. In fact, I won a composition award. It was a crummy little piece, but I won with it.
I can’t read music. Instead, I’d do stuff inside the piano, do harmonics and all kinds of crazy things. They used to put me in these annual piano contests down at Long Beach City College, and two years in a row, I won first prize – out of like 5,000 kids!
When my opera Plump Jack was performed in 1989, my first piano teacher sent me something that I’d composed when I was four. I remember I played it, and it still sounded like me. I’m the same composer I was then.
I don’t just strictly sample. I build. I’m a musician: I play piano and drums, I read notes, I write music.
I had studied piano since I was 13, but I was surrounded by students who’d been playing since they were 5. I realized I was never going to be anything but mediocre.
I play the piano passionately and inaccurately. Indeed, I worked out the other day that of my seventy-five years; I have spent at least one year sitting on a piano stool.
I really enjoy playing the piano. I took lessons throughout middle school, but I had to drop the lessons. I actually got too busy, but I hope to pick up the lessons when I’m in college if I can.
If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn’t have to go to an osteopath, then there’s something wrong.
I had piano lessons when I was younger, but I quit because I didn’t want to sit and learn the scales.
God didn’t give me the ability to play the piano, or paint a picture or have compassion. But… he did give me the ability to crack a walnut with my hoo-ha.
I never saw my grandfather because he had died before I was born, but I have good memories of my grandmother and of how she could play the piano at the old house.
Trying to determine the structure of a protein by UV spectroscopy was like trying to determine the structure of a piano by listening to the sound it made while being dropped down a flight of stairs.
If you can’t play it on an acoustic guitar or a grand piano then it’s not a song.
I think for me, I had a long-standing desire to orchestrate the sunrise, and never came up with the right thing on piano. So at a certain moment, I had the revelation that the whole thing would be electronic, not traditional acoustic.
My father shared the ethos of many of the beat writers and was a friend of Allen Ginsberg. Probably for 25 years of my father’s life, He had been an itinerant piano player and so traveled the road with bands and that sort of thing.
Piano performances by Condoleezza Rice are better than Hitler’s paintings.
My dad was a self-taught stride piano player. The myth is – I don’t whether it’s true or not – that he taught himself to play by watching a player piano.
I’ve played guitar and piano for a while, so it’s really fun to play music on film.
Schoolwork came easy to me. I learned to play piano effortlessly. I was coasting.
Too many jazz pianists limit themselves to a personal style, a trademark, so to speak. They confine themselves to one type of playing. I believe in using the entire piano as a single instrument capable of expressing every possible musical idea. I have no one style. I play as I feel.
Our daily life is filled with electronic pianos, ring tones, the disembodied voice giving you your bank balance over the telephone. Even silence can be electronic, courtesy of sound-canceling headphones.
Now, I only play very occasionally, and in fact, more piano than clarinet or sax.
I make movies the same way other kids play tennis or go to piano lessons. I’m trying to get better at what I want to do, just like other kids are trying to get better at what they want to do.
I remember learning how to play ‘The Fool On The Hill’ on piano when I was in maybe fifth grade.
I got obsessed with classical music, I got obsessed with Chopin, with playing the piano.
Homer Collyer’s chosen form of self-expression is the piano, although late in life, when his hearing also goes, he takes to writing.
When I was young, I wanted to be a writer or painter. I was always writing stories, and I excelled at drawing. My teachers encouraged my art work. When I was 9 or 10, I began learning piano and started writing music.
I grew up at the piano, and I longed to write musicals.
I like Stevie Wonder as my favorite non-pianist pianist. I mean, I shouldn’t call him a non-pianist, because he’s really a great pianist, but he doesn’t feature it that much – he uses his keyboards and his piano technique to support his great songs and so forth, but he can really blow.
Most of the time I write my best songs just from feeling a strong emotion, so whether I’m just really angry or really sad or really happy, I immediately sit down at a piano and I begin writing a song.
Age enlarges and enriches the powers of some musical instruments – notably those of the violin – but it seems to set a piano’s teeth on edge.
Never have your wallet with you onstage. It’s bad luck. You shouldn’t play the piano with money in your pocket. Play like you need the money.
Three times a day Petrovich showed up at the nurse’s office for his injections, always using the hypodermic needle himself like the most craven of junkies, though after shooting up he would play the concert piano in the auditorium with astounding artistry, as though insulin were the elixir of genius.
I basically am the only musician in my family. My aunt plays a little piano, but that’s about it. My dad’s mother painted and was actually good at it. I do not come from a long line of musicians, though.
I love the classics but there are many new ideas to be made into reality. I’d rather be concerned with my own thing. There are many masters of classical piano so I’ll leave it to them.
False notes [on the piano] are human. Why does everything have to be perfect? You know, perfection itself is imperfection.
rain began to beat at the narrow lattice windows in the stop-and-start manner of an untalented child practicing scales at the piano.
I had been playing single note instruments and I wanted to hear a guitar played as a piano.
Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words.
The piano has disappeared from working-class family life, which is a shame. It’s associated with the middle classes now. Everyone in my family sang and played piano, but my parents were delighted and amazed when I became the first professional performer in the family – apart from a clog-dancer way back.
The piano is kind of my second instrument.
I have a piano and a guitar, and I tend to switch back and forth between those two instruments to help me get inspired.
My mother played the piano and my father the violin, I can remember my dad teaching me how to waltz; I had my feet on his, my mother playing the piano, and my husband will tell you the lessons weren’t very successful.
In my son’s kindergarten, they’re telling us how to get him into Stanford. By their advice, I’m doing everything wrong, because I’m trying to make him happy rather than putting him through as many piano lessons as possible.
My father taught me to read music and play the piano-but not well, even though people have said that I’m a natural musician
When I am back home, I have an upright piano and I play constantly.
A trumpet sounds pretty much like a trumpet, and that’s true of a lot instruments; pianos sound like pianos, but there’s something about the guitar – the range of possibilities is much broader.
I can produce any instrument, any sound that I can imagine; it may be percussive to the audience, but in my mind it may be a piano, a melody, or a tuba, or a harp, or a harmonica. My mission is to allow people to hear the dance in its purity and up against any other type of sound or music.
I’m somebody who plays the piano… sometimes
It’s different for every song. But for ‘Say Something,’ I think it was Chad who had an idea on guitar, and I had an idea on piano for different songs, and we just married them together. We bounce things off each other constantly and kind of massage all these ideas into a three and a half minute pop song.
It won’t be long before we’ll be writing together again. I just hope they have a decent piano up there.
I’m a guitarist by background. That’s what I used to do for sessions when I was younger and that sort of thing. We have several pianos in the house and I tend to just sit and fiddle around.
I grew up with a piano, and my aunt taught me chords. I played with bands in high school and I could do like, C chord, G chord, D chord; really simple, rhythm piano.
I grew up the son of a Seventh Day Adventist minister, so I was really close to the church and sang church music between sips at my bottle, you know? I sat on the piano bench next to my mother. She was the church organist, so that music is deeply inside of me.
When you’re a child, you take things for granted. For instance, my mum didn’t have a lot of money, but I went to piano, ballet and gymnastics lessons, and tae kwon do.
There was always a piano around the house and I’ve got other brothers and sisters but I’m the youngest, and none of them ever wanted to play it. So I guess I was the only one that was gonna end up playing it, if it was one of us.
What I love about piano and vocal is it’s incredibly pure, and it gets down to the essence of the song because you’re not distracted by an orchestra. When it’s just a piano and a voice, it’s about the purity of singing the song.
I play piano very badly. That’s my great regret.
I have a Baldwin in my L.A. apartment, a Steinway in my New York apartment, and a Kawai plexiglass grand piano in storage for shows. I still play for two or three hours every day.
At the piano, I’m able to communicate in a way that is very intimate and direct. My approach at music is a bit like talking to a friend. You don’t have to be very complicated when you speak. If you say what’s in your heart, it’s usually very simple.
From 1936 on, I have taken more falls than any other 20 comedians put together. From the time I was 21, I’ve taken them on everything from clay courts to cement to wood floors, coming off pianos, going out a two-story window, landing on Dean, falling into the rough. You do that and you’re gonna have problems.
I guess, you know, if I didn’t make it with the piano, I guess I would’ve been the biggest bum.
A piano store looks like a funeral parlor for music.
I’m a kid for a living: I get to play the piano for a living.
I grew up with the Woodstock generation. I went to Woodstock, and like everybody in my school, I wanted to be in a rock-and-roll band, and most of us were. But I also grew up with a lot of piano lessons and a lot of classical music training.
I always wanted to be a musician, 100 percent, my whole life. I went to school, I did music theory, I did voice training and piano lessons, and while I was a decent musician, it didn’t seem like enough for me. I felt like I wanted to make more than just music.
I thought I knew Elton John, but then it was like, “Woah, Elton’s a pimp! He’s really amazing.” And since Billy and Elton are homies, I’m finally getting it – the two piano boys.
My husband is a composer, so he plays piano all the time and I sit there and clap telling my unborn child, ‘Hear me clap, hear the music.’ I know music, in general, is supposed to be good for babies to hear.
I liked school and was a bit of an all-rounder academically, I struggled with music. I can’t hold a note when singing and abandoned any notion of a career in music after barely scraping a pass in grade 2 piano.
Chopin was the first piano composer who knew exactly how to make piano sound reach fullness, radiance and grandness. What to regard and what, by all means, to avoid. Chopin was keenly aware of the overtones and he did take care of them so artfully.
One of my earliest memories of writing at a piano was alongside my sister.
I don’t really have a relationship with the guitar; it’s like my slutty lover, whereas I’m married to the piano
Well, I was very lucky. I was brought up west southwest coast of Scotland and my mother and father had a music shop, and so I was surrounded by pianos and drums and guitars, and music, of course.
When I’m playing live, I’ll rip out a ballad from my album, and I’ll play that solo on the piano, which feels really good because it kind of takes me back to when I was younger.
I don’t like to play the piano. It makes me too attractive.
I think my love of music comes from my dad. I was born with an ear for music, like him, and started with the piano when I was 4 but fell in love with the drums. My dad always has music playing.
I’m blessed with a good pair of ears. That’s how I fooled my piano teacher. I’d watch his fingers and I’d listen to it, and I just kind of basically learned it by myself.
It’s funny, I guess when I was growing up, I didn’t really think about being an instrumentalist, per se. I didn’t think, well, I want to be a piano player, or, I want to be a guitar player, or even, I want to be a singer. I just wanted to be a musician.
I get twitchy if I don’t pick up a guitar or sit at the piano every now and then… I have to do it; I don’t have a choice.
I play piano and I sing. But I do that for fun. I mean, I do everything for fun.
Everyone at school knew I wanted to be a singer. I’d always be banging on the piano playing my new song. The teacher would gather us round, and the whole class would listen.
I took piano lessons when I was 6. I didn’t want to go on with it. I don’t remember being moved by a piece of music.
To finally be able to actually play the piano with vocalists and actually do, like, a proper concert – that feels really good.
I know what my job is: I write the songs, I sing them, I play them on the piano
The harp was so much more gestural and physical for me than the piano – something about bringing this instrument into your body.
One of my biggest thrills for me still is sitting down with a guitar or a piano and just out of nowhere trying to make a song happen.
I grew up with the British-Chicago crossover of house music with a lot of pianos and very heavy bass lines, but what I love about house is you can mix it up a bit.
Steinway is the only piano on which the pianist can do everything he wants. And everything he dreams.
It so happened that Lucy, who found daily life rather chaotic, entered a more solid world when she opened the piano. She was then no longer either deferential or patronizing; no longer either a rebel or a slave.
With ‘Broadcast News,’ it became a non-issue, and with ‘The Piano,’ it became a non-issue. Both parts were written for more statuesque women. It was nice to change people’s minds about that, because that’s neither here nor there.
I play the piano, drums, little bit of bass, guitar. I can play harmonica, a little bit of the ukulele. Pretty much anything that’s a strumming, string type thing.
One of the loveliest things about being grown up is the knowledge that never again will I have to go through the miserable business of performing in Mrs. Smedley’s Annual Piano Recital at McKinleyville’s First Presbyterian Church.
Now, when I play soul piano, for instance, and I play a rendition of ‘Spain,’ I do it deconstructively. That’s the most fun, but I can only do that when I’m on my own.
I’m glad I went through the training because I’ve met such great mentors and lifelong friends/collaborators along the way. Also, any training (acting, movement, dance, piano, singing, etc) allowed me to hone my skills and find an inner space of self-generating creativity.
I never took guitar lessons. I took classical piano lessons from the age of six when we lived in Holland.
My end goal in the piano is to play Scott Joplin’s ‘Maple Leaf Rag.
From the time I could play the piano, I remember trying to write tunes. They were in my head, and I would just sit down and start noodling. Next thing I knew, I had written a melody.
When I’m flying, I really like to listen to piano music. Something impressionistic, loud and beautiful. Flying can be such a claustrophobic experience, it’s nice to open that up a bit with music.
Everybody in our family studied a musical instrument. My father was really big on that. Somehow I only took a year or two of piano lessons and I convinced my father to let me take dancing lessons.
I grew up in rural Oregon in a log house with bark left on inside and out. We had no electricity, a massive stone fireplace, a grand piano, and tons of books.
I ended up taking piano lessons at a really young age, I took, like, years of piano lessons, and I always loved to sing.
I get twitchy if I don’t pick up a guitar or sit at the piano every now and then… I have to do it; I don’t have a choice.
Good Lord’s been kind to me, that’s all I can say. I wake up in the morning with music in my head a lot of times. I won’t say every morning, but I wake up in the morning sometimes with eight bars in my head and I just go to the piano.
I also became inspired by impressionist painters such as Renoir, and wanted to do the same sort of thing with music-portray whatever mood strikes me the way Keith Jarrett does on piano.
I might have a guitar or a piano on set to play something for the actors.
I like to be with my children – not just quality time, but quantity time. I like to be there in the morning when they’re waking up. I like to practice piano with them. I like to be there at supper. I need them as much as they need me. Working is not as important to me as being a mother is.
Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.
Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.
I played piano, I learned a lot about music.
Well I mean I just sit at the piano and maybe figure out some harmony or melody or both. Sometimes you can hear it in your head. Sometimes you don’t always have to write it down. You just write it down so you can remember it.
I learned to read music when I was 10 and did piano and took lessons.
(Referring to the piano’s natural shape) Isn’t it a shame when those big fat opera singers lean against the pianos and bend them?
I never had much interest in the piano until I realized that every time I played, a girl would appear on the piano bench to my left and another to my right.
I wanted to try to write songs on the piano to get a different flavor.
I consider myself a part-time worker when it comes to the piano, but you need to play regularly to stay sharp.
My entire life, I’ve always known that I wanted to be a performer, but I didn’t know exactly how, where or when. I never learned or studied the craft, formally. I grew up doing martial arts and playing piano. But, something inside of me always said that I was going to do this, as far back as I can remember.
Were it not for music, we might in these days say, the Beautiful is dead.
My original dream was to become a singer-songwriter, so I sent a video of myself playing the piano and singing to all the big agencies.
During the couple of years it took to write ‘At The Bottom of Everything’, I decided, on the sort of hopeful whim that occasionally overtakes me, to sign up for piano lessons.
When I was nine, my father said ‘You can take piano lessons or do karate’ – I had a black belt and was competing before I was 19.
I don’t come from a particularly musical family. My mother learned a bit of piano in Korea. When I was three, I apparently climbed up on our upright piano and started picking Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star out.
It’s not a bloody piano, it’s a clarenARt…you weird talking person.
George Winston piano albums have been my go-to since junior high.
The Steinway piano is such an incomparable instrument. Due to its virtues, I am able to express all my musical feelings.
