It took me a long time to recognize the value of using quotes with my students when teaching the piano. I’m not good at remembering quotes and used to feel that people who used a lot of quotes were really just trying to be pretentious. However, after having lessons with teachers who valued and used quotes effectively, I finally came around to understanding that quotes can be very efficient mechanisms for expressing ideas and thoughts. Consequently, I started collecting various quotes about music that I deemed valuable for my teaching and made a list of them for my convenience.
Practicing
“Practice very slowly – progress very fast.”
– Stephen Heller
“If practicing feels easy, you’re probably not doing it right.”
– Noa Kageyama
“Practice with your fingers and you need all day. Practice with your mind and you will do as much in 1 1/2 hours.”
– Leopold Auer
“An amateur practices until he can do a thing right, a professional until he can’t do it wrong.”
– Percy C. Buck
“If I don’t practice one day, I know it; two days, the critics know it; three days, the public knows it.”
– Jascha Heifetz
Performing
“The wrong note played with gusto always sounds better than the right note played timidly.”
-Tommy Jordan
“The piano ain’t got no wrong notes.”
-Thelonious Monk
“To play a wrong note is insignificant; to play without passion is inexcusable.”
– Ludwig van Beethoven
“SAND and sound. Try this experiment. Grab a fistful of sand and squeeze – hard. What happens? The harder you squeeze, the more the sand runs out. There’s a lesson here. Think about sound – and let go.”
– Suzanne W. Guy
“Aim for excellence, not perfection”
– Penny Black
“It seems to me that you don’t dare to express yourself as you feel. Be bolder, let yourself go more. Imagine you’re at the Conservatoire, listening to the most beautiful performance in the world. Make yourself want to hear it, and then you’ll hear yourself playing it right here. Have full confidence in yourself; make yourself want to sing like Rubini, and you’ll succeed in doing so. Forget you’re being listened to, and always listen to yourself. I see that timidity and lack of self-confidence form a kind of armour around you, but through this armour I perceive something else that you don’t always dare to express, and so you deprive us all. When you’re at the piano, I give you full authority to do whatever you want; follow freely the ideal you’ve set for yourself and which you must feel within you; be bold and confident in your own powers and strength, and whatever you say will always be good. It would give me so much pleasure to hear you play with complete abandon that I’d find the shameless confidence of the “vulgaires” unbearable by comparison.”
– Frederick Chopin
Music Teaching
“Move from the known to the unknown”
– B.K.S. Iyengar
“Have the body supple right to the tips of the toes.”
– Frederick Chopin
“We use sounds to make music just as we use words to make a language.”
– Frederick Chopin
“The music is not in the notes, but in the silence in between.”
– Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
“Simplicity is the highest goal, achievable when you have overcome all difficulties. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.”
– Frederick Chopin
“A long note is stronger, as is also a high note. A dissonant is likewise stronger, and equally so a syncopated note. The ending of a phrase, before a comma, or a stop is always weak. If the melody ascends, one plays crescendo, if it descends, decrescendo. Moreover, notice must be taken of natural accents. For instance, in a bar of two, the first note is strong, the second weak, in a bar of three the first strong and the two others weak. To the smaller parts of the bar the same direction will apply. Such then are the rules: the exceptions are always indicated by the authors themselves.”
– Frederick Chopin
“It is better to deeply understand one field than to be acquainted with ten thousand.”
– Chinese Proverb
“Look at these trees! (Liszt) said, The wind plays in the leaves, stirs up life among them, the tree remains the same, that is Chopinesque rubato”
– Liszt
“Above all, make me forget as I listen to you, that the piano has hammers.”
– Debussy
“Technique represents the material side of art, as money represents the material side of life. By all means achieve a fine technique, but do not dream that you will be artistically happy with this alone… Technique is a chest of tools from which the skilled artisan draws what he needs at the right time for the right purpose. The mere possession of the tools means nothing: it is the instinct – the artistic intuition as to when and how to use the tools – that counts. It is like opening the drawer and finding what one needs at the moment.”
– Josef Hofmann
“PEDALS are for color… fingers are for legato. Hands before Feet.”
– Suzanne W. Guy
“Tell me, I forget; Show me, I remember; Involve me, I understand”
– Carl Orff
“Music is what feelings sound like.”
– Unknown
“Pedal with your ears”
– Unknown
Improvising and Composition
“A good composer does not imitate; he steals.”
– Igor Stravinsky
“Country music is three chords and the truth.”
– Harlan Howard
Miscellaneous
“The sonatas of Mozart are unique; they are too easy for children, and too difficult for artists.”
– Artur Schnabel
Piano Lessons for Adults 