Quotes & Sayings About Baroque Music

I'm involved with a baroque opera company here in Italy. I write some of their booklet material, comments on operas. I also write for some baroque opera festivals because this music is my real passion. — Donna Leon

Normally, things are viewed in these little segmented boxes. There's classical, and then there's jazz; romantic, and then there's baroque. I find that very dissatisfying. I was trying to find the thread that connects one type of music - one type of musician - to another, and to follow that thread in some kind of natural, evolutionary way. — Jerry Lee Lewis

I think in Baroque music, especially in the case of Bach, what really transformed Bach's musical language, what changed it for him was hearing Vivaldi, hearing the sort of manipulation of small cells of information and patterns in order to generate sort of huge blocks of harmony. — Mahan Esfahani

I've always been heavily influenced by classical music, mostly by baroque music. — Yngwie Malmsteen

Classical, Romantic, and Baroque music, that's what I really like. — Joan Armatrading

My thesis statement would be - Bach didn't write Baroque music. He wrote great music. — Chris Thile

Music always stimulates my imagination. When I'm writing I usually have some Baroque music on low in the background chamber music by Bach, Telemann, and the like. — Haruki Murakami

My father was a classical singer of baroque music, and my older sister was in musical theatre, and I thought about doing the same thing but then realised straight acting was for me. — Antonia Thomas

I think, you know, for someone who does play, let's say, old music or, you know, Baroque music or Renaissance music - and you know, and I do play a lot of that, obviously - engaging with new composers, engaging with young composers, is really exciting because it makes me look at people of the past in a very different way that they are also living, that there was a lot of subjectivity in the decisions that they were making. — Mahan Esfahani

I think I've learned more about Baroque music than any other genre. — Joyce DiDonato

I still the love classic period, but also the baroque period, and even 17th-Century music such as the music of Monteverdi. He's one of the greatest opera composers. He was the one who really started the opera. — Cecilia Bartoli

If you have a piece by Bach, he often develops the piece to such a high level that you can hardly do much more to it. But Saint-Luc wrote very simple baroque music, and so if you do not embellish it, it just falls apart. It's way too simple. — David Russell

When I say that there's commonality, I mean more in terms of the sort of techniques by which we perceive Baroque and minimalist music rather than the techniques used to compose them. I know that's being sort of overly complicated. — Mahan Esfahani

Has it struck you that the music which is regarded as the most sublime in western civilization, which is the music of Bach, is called baroque? — Pierre Schaeffer

The streets of Prague were a fantasia scarcely touched by the twenty-first century - or the twentieth or nineteenth, for that matter. It was a city of alchemists and dreamers, its medieval cobbles once trod by golems, mystics, invading armies. Tall houses glowed goldenrod and carmine and eggshell blue, embellished with Rococo plasterwork and capped in roofs of uniform red. Baroque cupolas were the soft green of antique copper, and Gothic steeples stood ready to impale fallen angels. The wind carried the memory of magic, revolution, violins, and the cobbled lanes meandered like creeks. Thugs wore Motzart wigs and pushed chamber music on street corners, and marionettes hung in windows, making the whole city seem like a theater with unseen puppeteers crouched behind velvet. — Laini Taylor

I listen to music when I write. I need the musical background. Classical music. I'm behind the times. I'm still with Baroque music, Gregorian chant, the requiems, and with the quartets of Beethoven and Brahms. That is what I need for the climate, for the surroundings, for the landscape: the music. — Elie Wiesel

Jazz, for me, is a closed circuit, like the term baroque in the world of classical music. — Jan Garbarek

What is at the higher levels of meaning consciousness is like a hyperspace in which each point is equidistant from the other and where 'the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere'? The mythologies of the occult seem like baroque music: there is an overall similar quality of sound and movement, but, upon examination, each piece of music is unique; Vivaldi and Scarlatti are similar and different. — William Irwin Thompson

Others, tiring of the sound of Buxtehude and Bach for hours on end, would complain there was no tune. That was exactly the thing he liked best about a fugue, the fact that it could not be sung. A fugue was not singular, as a melody was, but plural. It was a conversation. — Kate Grenville

I've done a lot of performance practice, Baroque playing, and some of the joy and the challenge of it is figuring out what the composer intended ... You have music of the 17th century - it's all whole notes and half notes. But inside of that, there are so many things that one can do, at least according to what we know about performance practice. — Caroline Shaw

Memory is the grid of meaning we impose on the random and bewildering flux of the world. Memory is the line we pay out behind us as we travel through time
it is the clue, like Ariadne's, which means we do not lose our way. Memory is the lasso with which we capture the past and haul it from chaos towards us in nicely ordered sequences, like those of baroque keyboard music. — Angela Carter

I think I'm fascinated with history and - just in general. And I'm always interested in how did - how did this come to be? Why is this the way it is? And even singing classical voice, I quickly became more and more interested with early music, baroque voice. And that became an obsession to me - just figuring out how - who are the ancestors of whatever it is. — Cecile McLorin Salvant

Handel's yearning for independence from the traditional chains of patronage and his persistence in monitoring his productions resulted with unique developments concerning Baroque 'opera seria'; however, paradoxically his personal obsession to obtain complete artistic freedom generated disastrous side-effects that eventually impeded the progress of opera in London. — E.A. Bucchianeri