Glenn Gould Quotes

Whenever I start to really think about what I'm playing, I may play it better musically, but the feeling isn't there.

What comprises good performance? The ability through singing or playing to make the ear conscious of the true content and affect of a composition.

The way to do it is to put as much life into the song as I can. You can either get it to breathe or you can't.

The art of interpretation is not to play what is written.

I just sit down at the piano and rattle it off.

Just like using an instrument, a song calls for different things.

Fingers don't have much to do with playing the piano. The idea that they do must be unlearned.

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.

I think this orchestra's strengths involve drama and voice.

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.

I'm not a natural songwriter.

The role of the musician is to go from concept to full execution. Put another way, it's to go from understanding the content of something to really learning how to communicate it and make sure it's well-received and lives in somebody else.

Sometimes I feel like a melody doesn't have anything to do with me, but it's just something that comes, is accumulated from me playing on the piano, and then this little creature just appears.

That's what it is that you rehearse - the making of music, not the playing of notes as abstractions.

When you play a violin piece, you are a storyteller, and you're telling a story.

If I'm focusing on playing and enjoying the song, then it always goes well. I get lost in the song, and the performance is so much better. If the focus becomes not making a mistake, then it just feels rigid to me.

With few exceptions, music has been for some centuries the art which has devoted itself not to the reproduction of natural phenomena, but rather to the expression of the artist's soul, in musical sound.

I think I'm a songwriter. I grab an instrument to make my body a song, but I'm not a player as such, maybe a little more on guitar, but certainly not piano.

If you only do little clusters - three or four songs by one, and another, and then yet another - you lose the opportunity to think your way into the composer's mind, since, after all, most of these pieces are quite brief.

Music has nothing to do with your technical ability.

Good taste - that's all you really need when you're playing an instrument.

You have to follow every melodic line, every emotional idea, or you don't get your money's worth.

My music wouldn't sound the way it does if I hadn't had the experience of conducting.

I never think about rhythm versus melody; I've always just played to what's in my head.

But if you listen to great piano players, both classical and jazz, there's a huge range of dynamics and colors and emotional expression that's possible with the instrument.