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Sergei Rachmaninoff Quotes

Music is enough for a lifetime - but a lifetime is not enough for music.

Music is enough for a lifetime - but a lifetime is not enough for music.

Sergei Rachmaninoff
Inspirational, Music, Jazz And Life

What is Music? How do you define it? Music is a calm moonlit night, the rustle of leaves in Summer. Music is the far off peal of bells at dusk! Music comes straight from the heart and talks only to the heart: it is Love! Music is the Sister of Poetry and her Mother is sorrow!

Sergei Rachmaninoff
Summer, Mother, Heart

I compose music because I must give expression to my feelings, just as I talk because I must give utterance to my thoughts.

Sergei Rachmaninoff
Expression, Giving, Feelings

The new kind of music seems to create not from the heart but from the head. Its composers think rather than feel. They have not the capacity to make their works exalt - they meditate, protest, analyze, reason, calculate and brood, but they do not exalt.

Sergei Rachmaninoff
Heart, Thinking, Kind

The virtuosos look to the students of the world to do their share in the education of the great musical public. Do not waste your time with music that is trite or ignoble. Life is too short to spend it wandering in the barren Saharas of musical trash.

Sergei Rachmaninoff
Life Is Too Short, Musical, World
"Great Pianists on Piano Playing". Book by James Francis Cooke, p. 217, 1999.

I feel like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien. I cannot cast out the old way of writing and I cannot acquire the new. I have made an intense effort to feel the musical manner of today, but it will not come to me.

Sergei Rachmaninoff
Writing, Effort, Musical
"Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music". Book by Sergei Bertensson and Jay Leyda, p. 351, 2002.

The most efficient way to memorise a piece is to use the one which proceeds in an error free manner

Sergei Rachmaninoff
Errors, Use, Pieces

My dear hands. Farewell, my poor hands.

Sergei Rachmaninoff
Farewell, Hands, Poor
"Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music". Book by Sergei Bertensson, p. 381, 2002.

A good conductor ought to be a good chauffeur; the qualities that make the one also make the other. They are concentration, an incessant control of attention, and presence of mind; the conductor only has to add a little sense of music.

Sergei Rachmaninoff
Presence Of Mind, Quality, Add
"Rachmaninoff's Recollections". Book by Oskar von Riesemann, p. 155, 1934.

Opinion in all parts of the world would agree that Rachmaninoff is the most complete of living masters of the instrument; his technique is comprehensive, and he is, of course, musical to his bone's marrow. Most important of all, he is a composer, and for this reason he is able to approach a work as none of his pianist contemporaries can approach one - that is, from the inside, as an organic and felt creative process.

Sergei Rachmaninoff
Creative, Musical, Important

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