Best quotes by Ravi Shankar on Music

Checkout quotes by Ravi Shankar on Music

• ‟ In the U.K., classical music is composed by individuals and written down. Indian music is based on certain sequences called ragas. When I perform live, 95% of the music is improvised: it never sounds the same twice.

  - Ravi Shankar
  

• ‟ Pop changes week to week, month to month. But great music is like literature.

  - Ravi Shankar
  

• ‟ I try to give to my music the spiritual quality, very deep in the soul, which does something even if you are not realizing it or analyzing it - that's the duty of the music.

  - Ravi Shankar
  

• ‟ In the olden days, I believe Mozart also improvised on piano, but somehow in the last 200 years, the whole training of Western classical music - they don't read between the lines, they just read the lines.

  - Ravi Shankar
  

• ‟ The music that I have learned and want to give is like worshipping God. It's absolutely like a prayer.

  - Ravi Shankar
  

• ‟ My music has a very spiritual background, a sanctity that is almost like worship.

  - Ravi Shankar
  

• ‟ In India, I have been called a 'destroyer.' But that is only because they mixed my identity as a performer and as a composer. As a composer I have tried everything, even electronic music and avant-garde. But as a performer I am, believe me, getting more classical and more orthodox, jealously protecting the heritage that I have learned.

  - Ravi Shankar
  

• ‟ My secret ambition was always to provide music for animation films: something with an Indian theme, either a fairy tale or mythological tale or on the Krishna theme. I still have a very deep desire, but these sorts of chances don't always come.

  - Ravi Shankar
  

• ‟ I will keep playing as long as my body lets me, and as long as I'm wanted by my listeners. Because music is the only thing that keeps me going.

  - Ravi Shankar
  

• ‟ I started out as a dancer, but gradually became more interested in music.

  - Ravi Shankar
  

• ‟ I don't appreciate avant-garde, electronic music. It makes me feel quite ill.

  - Ravi Shankar
  

• ‟ My brother had a house in Paris. To it came many Western classical musicians. These musicians all made the same point: 'Indian music,' they said, 'is beautiful when we hear it with the dancers. On its own, it is repetitious and monotonous.'

  - Ravi Shankar
  

• ‟ Ah, 'Pather Panchali' was the most inspiring film that I wrote music for, and it was so spontaneously done. I saw the film, composed on the spot, along with myself and only four other musicians, and everything was done within 4-1/2 hours, I think an all-time record anywhere.

  - Ravi Shankar