Island Quote by Glenn Gould

There is a reactionary conservative side of classical music, which is not the most exciting side of it. The side that draws me in,…

— Bryce Dessner

“...as a pianist, I can’t say I was always a big fan of contemporary music. The challenge of late Beethoven, or Mozart, or Schubert…

— Leon Fleisher

The musical culture in the United States has no doubt suffered severe setbacks, especially in funding, since the early 2000's. However, I've been amazed…

— Michael Hersch

The pieces that have survived, the ones that we all love, were not all popular in their time. Just look at Beethoven's late string…

— David Finckel

“Concert pianists get to be quite chummy with dead composers. They can't help it. Classical music isn't just music . It's a personal diary.…

— Marisha Pessl

It's easier to interest a conservative audience in pushing the musical boundaries than to involve a young audience used to very noisy, assertive music…

— Michael Tilson Thomas

I love the classics but there are many new ideas to be made into reality. I'd rather be concerned with my own thing. There…

— Nina Simone

“It was the quartets of Beethoven (numbers 12,13,14, and 15) which over fifty years, created and expanded the the audience of listeners to the…

— Marcel Proust

“They [the critics] deal with Schoenberg’s early works and all their wealth by classifying them, with the music-historical cliché, as late romantic post-Wagnerian. One…

— Anonymous

If you think of the history, in the days of Brahms and Beethoven and all these guys, almost every concert was a new music…

— Esa-Pekka Salonen

The problem with composers is that they are the most unrequired job in America.

— Gail Zappa

I love listening to things like those wonderful piano pieces of Stockhausen. It's just not my thing as a composer or performer, and thank…

— Stephen Hough