Best quotes by Charles Hazlewood on Music

Checkout quotes by Charles Hazlewood on Music

• ‟ For too long, musicians have been the greatest enemy of music. Their lack of desire to proselytize is a kind of betrayal.

  - Charles Hazlewood
  

• ‟ I'd like to explode a few myths about what we call classical music. It's not high art for the titillation of a chosen few.

  - Charles Hazlewood
  

• ‟ Music is about communication, and the chemistry between an audience and the orchestra is absolutely essential; the performance does not exist in a bubble.

  - Charles Hazlewood
  

• ‟ Music is a lens through which to see who we are. Every phrase of every piece of music is trying to tell a story.

  - Charles Hazlewood
  

• ‟ I abhor the words 'classical music.' Few things satisfy me more than a really good cover version.

  - Charles Hazlewood
  

• ‟ Purcell is a composer who had a formative influence on British music - even The Who now cite him as an influence. There's an intense, dirty harmony, but there's a Louis XIV kind of elan and style, too. He had the melancholy DNA of our national folk heritage.

  - Charles Hazlewood
  

• ‟ When I analyse the music, I can get really extreme.

  - Charles Hazlewood
  

• ‟ I think most people's record collections are more interesting than radio generally gives them credit for. You're likely to be as interested in the Grateful Dead as Palestrina. It pisses me off how compartmentalised music is. I used to be in a punk band, you know?

  - Charles Hazlewood
  

• ‟ For anyone who doesn't have that connection with Mozart, I urge those people to go and find some of his music, because it can quite genuinely make you just glad to be alive.

  - Charles Hazlewood
  

• ‟ All roads for me lead back to Mozart. In his tragically short life, he breathed new life, fire and meaning into every form of music that existed in his time.

  - Charles Hazlewood
  

• ‟ I have loads of issues with the way classical music is presented. It has been too reverential, too 'high art' - if you're not in the club, they're not going to let you join. It's like The Turin Shroud: don't touch it because it might fall apart.

  - Charles Hazlewood
  

• ‟ People like Aphex Twin, Jason Pierce, Jarvis Cocker and William Orbit are actively showing their interest in a wider field of music. Jarvis and I met on a benefit for an extraordinary man called LaMonte Young, the father of minimalism, who worked with John Cale and shared a loft with Yoko Ono.

  - Charles Hazlewood
  

• ‟ I'm always up for music shows such as Jools Holland, but news more than anything, particularly Newsnight. And cookery: Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Rick Stein - it's down to him that I cook fish so much - and the great food alchemist Heston Blumenthal.

  - Charles Hazlewood
  

• ‟ Classical music has become rarefied, like a maiden aunt that nobody wants to talk to.

  - Charles Hazlewood
  

• ‟ A hundred years ago, concerts were far more come-what-may - people played cards, drank beer and appreciated the music. If we go some way towards restoring that spirit, I'll be happy.

  - Charles Hazlewood
  

• ‟ I admire Tom Ades: he's a brilliant conductor, and he gets just the right hard, brilliant sound from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra for Russian music.

  - Charles Hazlewood
  

• ‟ There is a terrible conservatism, like a cancer, right in the heartlands of music-making, a tremendous resistance to change, an absolute horror of the idea that more people might connect with music. That infuriates me more than I can say.

  - Charles Hazlewood
  

• ‟ It's wonderful doing concerts in places like New York and London, but I feel a responsibility to also bring my work home, to bring world-class, classical music to Somerset.

  - Charles Hazlewood
  

• ‟ Somerset desperately needs more high-end music making on its doorstep, so the chance to share great music spanning genres as diverse as orchestral classics, trip hop and jazz, in the utterly relaxed and cathartic environment of a Somerset field, is for me the fulfilment of a long-term dream.

  - Charles Hazlewood
  

• ‟ I want people to hear really exciting music played by the best, but in a context where they can clap when they want to, chase their toddlers, drink beer, take photos, get lost in the music and generally be themselves. And because a field has no rules, it's the perfect place to create unlikely combinations of musical genres.

  - Charles Hazlewood
  

• ‟ It still amazes me how many musicians aren't really interested in engaging with their audience at all. Alfred Brendel, a pianist for whom I have the greatest respect, has described performance as a sacred communion between the artist and the composer. But what about the audience? Music is communication, a two-way street.

  - Charles Hazlewood