The best way to refine an interpretation is by getting out and performing.
When you play a violin piece, you are a storyteller, and you're telling a story.
I think if there's ever been a time we need music more, it's now. For our kids, it teaches you to take time, to listen, to work together, to listen to other people, and to use your brain. That's why classical music doesn't work when you throw it at people in a subway platform while they're rushing to work. Classical music is something that needs to be contemplated, you have to be completely present with an active mind that's working. It's not background music.
There are some days I take my violin out and it feels dreadful, like nothing is responding, and I want to sell it and get rid of it. And the next day suddenly the skies open up and the sound is glorious again. So it's like a relationship: There are good days and bad days.
I hope I will always have the chance to play the violin.
You don't have to have lots of love affairs to know what love is.
I open up my violin case every day, and have one of the great creations. It is very inspiring. It makes you want to practice. How can you open up a case and look at a violin that was made in 1713 by one of the greatest artists in history and then say, "No, I don't feel like practicing today."
Kids need to be structured in some way, but you don't want to force something down their throats that they have no interest in.
You only live once, so I try to say yes to everything.
There are days that I get neurotic with the instrument [violin]. Every little adjustment will change the balance for good or for bad. It's kind of a miracle, the way the whole thing works as an acoustical whole, so perfectly balanced that any little thing will - which also means the weather, the humidity.
I don't listen to a lot of music when I have my free time. But I'll go to a jazz club and have a drink and listen to a good jazz musician. Or sometimes in the morning, if I want to put myself in a good mood, I'll put on some Latin music.
There are some great teachers who have had great students, but they themselves can't play a note. I don't understand it, because the most I learned from my teacher was just hearing him play.
Music plays a huge role in the movie. The music in Star Wars, I can't imagine what the movie would have been like without it. It made the film.
We live in the least ugly time in history. If you look at back when Beethoven was writing, half the kids were dying, mothers were dying at childbirth, there were more wars going on then than there are now. People wrote the most beautiful things during the ugliest times.
Being a classical musician, you're doing many things anyway. One day you're doing Bach concerto and the next you're doing some avant-garde thing. It's just another hat that I'm allowed to wear.
I don't sleep with a violin in my bed, but there is something very magical about the instrument. You open up the case; it's a masterpiece, it's gorgeous, the varnish is still there from 300 years ago. People who know violins, they look at it and it's almost like a face.
I was lucky enough to have parents who started me on music very early, but most kids don't get that kind of exposure.
If you mess up the tiniest little thing in the Beethoven concerto, or the phrasing isn't just exactly perfectly executed, Beethoven brings out the worst in the best violinist. You almost never hear a satisfying performance, because it doesn't play itself.
I don't want to portray myself as a daredevil. I'm not at all.
Social media puts us inside our phones and our computers and our headphones, and we're not connecting so much with our outside environment. Even when people go to the Grand Canyon they're more concerned about the selfies than actually looking at the canyon. I see it with my own kids - the addiction to needing things fast, never pausing to just see what's around us and connect with our fellow human beings in real time.
So much of performing is a mind game.
There's nothing more frustrating than seeing a conductor say, 'Play softer,' as they're waving their hands in huge gestures.
I always find it funny when people say, "I don't really like classical music" or "it doesn't do anything for me." I tell them, "Well, you know, it does. You go to films and you're responding to it, and you've heard it..." It's controlling you! So don't think you're not being affected. It's a great medium for music.
Conducting is a strange thing to teach.
I like working with kids because I enjoy seeing the looks on their faces and, it's kind of selfish, I want a future audience.
