musical vocation Quotes

Being a musician is a given for me-I didn't have much choice in the matter.

I was born to be a musician.

When you decide to become an opera singer, it's a commitment that allows nothing else to interfere. Even your family - and I have a young daughter - has to take second place.

I've never had a musical career. So I think it's been unaffected. I play the accordion. In terms of thinking of it as a musical career, I think it's sort of like calling yourself an astronaut because you have a shiny suit.

Music is what I am, everything else is what I do.

I knew I could never give up on music. Completely devoid of any religious or iconic context, I felt like music was handed down to me - this is what I was going to do.

I am proud to be able to claim that, from the age of nineteen, I've managed to earna living entirely as a composer.

My primary calling, I always knew since the age of 11, was as a composer, and so that had to take priority.

Man, I just feel so fortunate to be a jazz musician at all. I have a hard time thinking of it any other way. It's such a fulfilling vocation. I love it.

Music is my life. The only other thing I've done is office work in different places. But no real professional career other than singing.

I think music is my destiny. I want to commit myself for what God called me to do.

I feel I was born with the music coming to me, and that's not something to be wasted.

I will gladly give lessons as a favor, particularly when I see that my student has talent, inclination, and anxiety to learn; but to be obliged to go to a house at a certain hour, or to have to wait at home for a pupil, is what I cannot do, no matter how much money it may bring me in. . . I am a composer and was born to be a Kapellmeister. I neither can nor ought to bury the talent for composition with which God in his goodness has so richly endowed me. . .

I am still not taking my "career" in music for granted. It is constantly surprising that it works. Generally my thinking about the future has this assumption of an impending apocalypse.

I make a living with a song, and I feel honored to do something I love and believe in.

I don't make music for any other reason than me enjoying music, and I am also glad that I am able to make a living of this.

The musicians in Chicago gave me my vocation, but New York calls to a jazz musician, for sure. You want to test your mettle.