Harrison Birtwistle Quotes

I wrote music as soon as I knew notation.

I'm not a professional; I lack even basic knowledge about writing music.

I think my mom always wanted to play the guitar, and somehow she projected that to me. So I started learning to play guitar when I was five years old, but actually I'd never managed to get the academic side of it. So even up to today, I don't know how to read or write music.

I love music. In a lot of my downtime, I spend time listening to other people's music or other people's rhymes and writing my own.

You cannot go wrong by learning classical music because it trains the ear.

I'm very interested, for instance, in music in education - getting young people not only to listen to, but participate in the music that I write. I consider this one of the most vital aspects of my work.

My parents were both high-school music teachers.

For me, everything definitely comes from music.

I completely love music. I used to be the music critic at 'The Improper Bostonian.' It's just something I've always loved very deeply.

I was in the band as a boy and was taught music and learned to compose.

I love making music, though. I love playing.

I just wanted to write about music if I wasn't going to make it.

I made a good living for a teenager. And I had to learn all different kinds of music - jazz, swing, Motown, pop - and that inspired what kind of music I started to write.

I've been writing music since I was a teenager. I play keyboards. I'm not much of a player, but I can write. That will come along. I'd like to do a musical.

And my career, the things that have happened have happened because of my music education background.

My mother was a very talented pianist, and she was a music teacher who hated to teach music, actually, but she loved to play, so I was brought up with Chopin, Debussy and Mozart.

In a way, I'm lucky that I was never classically trained and never went to a music college. I'm just from a normal working class family and happened to get obsessed with music as a teenager.

I'm an advocate of music in schools. It's important to me that music is in as many schools as possible across this country and across the world. I think that it's a lost art form because kids aren't as exposed to it as maybe they used to be, or should be. I was exposed heavily to jazz and that's why I love it.

When I was a young musician, the only option available to pursue secondary education in music was to attend a classical conservatory.

America does not need gorgeous halls and concert rooms for its musical development, but music schools with competent teachers, and many, very many, free scholarships for talented young disciples who are unable to pay the expense of study.

I've been interested in music since I was a teenager, always writing songs.

I see it as more of a teenage activity than, you know, she's only 11, but you know, I think it's great that she knows so many girls who want to play music. And I see it more as a teen activity than I do as going into music.

There was the best teachers from the Czech Philharmonic, highly dedicated people, some of the best musicians in the world passing on the knowledge about the country, about the principles, and about the music.

I've made music since I was a kid so I've always gotten joy out of that.

I went to college on a classical piano scholarship. My grandmother made me practice one full hour a day. Every day. Man. I thought all she wanted was for me not to have any fun. Next thing you know, you have a career in music. Now, not everybody's going to go on and be Mozart or Michael Jackson. But music makes you smarter.