Musical Instruction Quotes

When I was eight, an uncle, great uncle, gave a violin to me, and my father took me off to have lessons. After about six weeks, the violin teacher told my father he was wasting his money, wasting his time, and wasting my time, and it's one of my big regrets.

I'm a freak, everything has to be totally flat when I play. Ed Will, my jazz teacher, set up everything completely flat, and then you'd tilt your snare drum away from you, so I do that too. So my snare tilts away from me.

When I was a kid, my parents gave me piano lessons and guitar lessons for a while, but I was never very good at it. I have big, sort of awkward hands. It's hard to keep going when you don't get any better.

Occasionally, if I'm in doubt over specific Indian classical or raga-related questions, I'll find myself going back to my lesson tapes or my father's recordings.

But my mom was a pianist, and she taught piano out of her house. I was just so excited, being a little kid and having all these other kids come to my house twice a week. I thought it was a big party.

I taught myself until I was about 16. And then I studied classical guitar with some teachers.

Some critics have written that I wanted to teach through singing. Not at all. I was learning I went to school every time I gave a song recital.

I learned everything I know about music from my parents and my sisters.

The music teacher came twice a week to bridge the awful gap between Dorothy and Chopin.

They gave me four weeks, and I asked if the first week could be just music with the two main conductors. So, the conductors came over to my home, and we worked in the music room, and I learned my two little songs.

I can't even read notes. But I can teach someone how to make a guitar smoke.

I was nurtured to play music pretty much from birth.

Music, for centuries and centuries, was used to teach everything. It was used to teach language, mathematics, history. The news was music. Everything traveled by song. It was used to teach ethics. It was used to create conscience, probably more than anything.

I'm not a frustrated concert composer, and the concert pieces I've done have been a small part of my work. What I've sought there is instruction, variation from the demands of film and relief from its restrictions.

If you call someone up on a mistake - if the drummer's put an extra beat in a bar or something - you have a lot more authority if you can show them how to do it right.

The most important thing is to make a percussive instrument a singing instrument. Teachers should stress this aspect in their instruction, but it seems that very few of them actually do.

I had a teacher at school who told me to take up the harp.

I think conductors do spend too little time with their orchestras.

For centuries, everything was taught through music. History was taught through music; language and mathematics were taught through music.

There were so many specific things from high school jazz band that I remembered: the conductor searching out people who were out of tune, or stopping and starting me for hours in front of the band as they watched.

There are some great teachers who have had great students, but they themselves can't play a note. I don't understand it, because the most I learned from my teacher was just hearing him play.

Lots of young singers come to me and ask, 'May I sing to you?' I say, 'Yes, you can sing to me as long as you don't mind what I tell you, because I'm not going to flatter you. I'm going to tell you what I think.' Oh, yes, they're quite happy about that, until they hear it.

One of the most important elements in teaching, conducting, and performing, all three, is listening.

I was classically trained in operetta from about age 4, I think.

We had a music teacher in sixth grade, and I saw her tune her guitar. I said, 'Whoa. There's a certain way to do this.' I bought a packet of strings - some of mine were broken - and had her tune it for me. For a while, I just kept it like that. But I got the Internet finally, when I was 14, and started learning.