Yanni Quotes

My goal was to play drums, but my father made me take piano lessons. He told me I needed to learn to read music first, so I took lessons for six years. I thank God that he made me take those lessons, because it taught me a tremendous amount.

I've never known how to read music in my life.

When I was first aware that I couldn't read music I didn't know I couldn't read because I could play the music that was in front of me.

Reading and writing music is a wonderful way of getting ideas in your head down to someone else who reads and writes, but if you don't read and write, and the other musician you're playing with are trying to express something who doesn't read and write, than it's a question of "I wrote" so that you must learn from listening and from understanding where that's coming from.

We should read music in the same way that an educated adult will read a book: in silence, but imagining the sound.

I read and write classical piano and percussion, also guitar.

I like blues but it is music I am too ignorant to understand.

Reading music is something that's inherently hateful to me. It makes music like mathematics.

I don't read music. I don't write or read music.

Somehow in the 20th Century an idea has developed that music is an activity or skill which is not comprehensible to the man in the street. This is an arrogant assertion and not necessarily a true one.

I just can't read music.

But without the experience of actually singing or playing these things yourself, you don't have the same kind of involvement or understanding of what these musical moves mean. And that is a very big problem in addressing the future of music.

It has never been necessary for me to learn how to read music.

Yeah, I can read music and I know the names of chords.

I wish I could write music notation. Even if I couldn't play it, I wish I could just write it.

My books are personal: I'm not saying they're the Bible of music.

I'm a self-taught guitarist, but I have a classical music background.

My upbringing made me think that real legitimate music is written, not heard.

I was always singing around my house, and my parents thought they should put me into voice lessons just for fun.

I think it's a bit of a myth that if you can read music you can write music. It doesn't work like that.

A musicologist is a man who can read music but can't hear it.

You can't expect someone born into a family with no music... to understand when I'm conducting the Schoenberg Variations.

I started taking music lessons and singing when I was about ten.

I've been studying on my own. I'm not really trained. I went to school for about a year and a half. I never really studied music, but, I mean, I did. I studied for two years, maybe.

Quite a few musicians came to our house. And my ma took me to hear many more, hoping to encourage in me a love of music. But she wouldn't consent to my having music lessons, for she feared I might end up as she had done - unable to play except from paper.