Top 45 Bryce Dessner Quotes

Bands like Arcade Fire finding a larger audience has opened a lot of doors. They’ve empowered a whole community in Montreal.

My grandmother was born in Russia, and she came through Poland on her way to America in the early 20s. She moved to Brooklyn.

When I’m scoring something like a string quartet, it’s all notated music, so it’s meticulously written in the score, which is very different than doing things by ear.

I call The National my family, and I’ll be doing that as long as I want to.

Musicians are hungry for new music.

Early on, I was a performer playing classical music. It’s in my DNA in a way that I can’t begin to extract it.

It doesn’t necessarily take four years to write a good piece of music. It might take four hours. It just depends on when your inspiration comes.

I grew up going to see my sister dance, both at the ballet and later as a modern dancer, and have always been a big fan of the ballet. So I have had a long relationship with dance.

I studied classical guitar in school, and that type of stuff has led to writing for Kronos.

When I’m writing instrumental music, I try to find musical and non-musical inspirations.

We all contribute to The National, and it’s like a familiar family. Matt is dad, Brian‘s like the dark horse uncle, Scott‘s the long-suffering mum, and Aaron and I are the bratty twins.

As much as you try to organize your life, life will surprise you.

For me, the exhausting thing about touring is the sitting around, which is why working on my concert music is really great – and also seeing concerts and seeing friends and, whenever possible, getting out to see a museum.

As a pop musician, as someone who makes songs, the best ideas are the simplest. They come, and that’s the lightning bolt moment.

I think that becoming a successful rock band is a little like becoming a professional athlete. Nobody plans on it.

We’ve gotten better as a live band. The songs have been allowed to grow with our audience. I don’t think I would have done it any other way.

I can’t just play in a rock band. The National is a great, exciting band to play in. We improvise a lot onstage, and it’s very intense, but after a while, I crave other kinds of experiences.

As long as I’m still growing as a musician, it keeps me inspired.

Playing pentatonic scales over orchestral music is not something I want to do or listen to.

Inviting artists to do something, you want it to be a place where they’re going to feel challenged and excited and that will maybe open up some new doorway in their own lives or their own creative practice.

When I’m writing for certain instruments, you want to write within what you know about that instrument but also challenge the player. Something like ‘Aheym’ is very virtuosic – but because I have a history of performing music, I don’t like unplayable music.

Part of what I enjoy about writing classical music is communicating through the score and collaborating with such amazing musicians.

A lot of people ask how I ended up doing classical music given that I’m in a rock band. The truth is that it’s the other way around. I was trained as a classical musician and then started playing in a rock band later.

Typically, people think, ‘Oh the hippies and the punks hated each other,’ or that those things don’t go together musically. Sometimes that is true, but we had equal parts of both in our musical DNA.

I love the physicality of instruments, and instruments as objects, like dancers are bodies.

With ‘Boxer,’ we made the kind of music we wanted to make and didn’t really worry about what the expectation was.

I don’t labour over my lead guitar solos; they’re better just caught in the moment.

If you make rock music with guitars in it, the Radiohead comparison is inevitable.

We’ve played in places where there were more of us onstage than in the audience.

Me, who’s educated classically, I went toward rock music ’cause it was sort of a natural evolution from where I was playing with my brother. But I was always drawn back into classical music.

The danger of a rock band is repeating oneself. It’s our greatest fear – that it evolves into the myopia of a semi-successful band that’s in love with its own shadow.

We always say that National songs have to have a heart, that we don’t make cold songs.

Being a classical musician, you can go to school for it; you can go get a degree. Even as a composer, there is a certain career path you can follow, but becoming a rock musician is a much more elusive career. How do you learn that or do that?

I’ve got this diverse education, growing up in classical music and existing between that and music that is more visceral, so for sure, I’ve always been interested in music from other cultures.

Art is a way of life.

When working with classical musicians, it is important to be clear as possible in the score about what my intentions are. Because there isn’t a lot of rehearsal time, especially at the ballet, it’s best if everything is written in the score.

In terms of the music, it feels almost like trouble‘s a good thing – you never know when a song is going to surprise you. We look for these subversive moments in songs.

David Harrington, who’s the violinist and founder of Kronos, is a super open-minded and adventurous guy.

There are all kind of corners of the musical world that are deeply influenced by the Dead that one wouldn’t expect. Lee Ranaldo is a crazy Deadhead.

You don’t come to our shows if you want to look cool.

It’s not a hard sell to be asked to do something in Ireland.

There is a kind of adventure- and risk-seeking audience in classical contemporary music that is really empowering and part of what draws me to it. The people that come to these concerts are open-minded and curious.

For many people in the music conservatory world, the message was always, Focus! ‘You can’t do everything; you really need to specialize.’ And especially at an early age, I ignored this advice.

In terms of identity, I’m the same person no matter what I’m doing.

For a composer of concert music, 40 is actually very young. But for a rock musician, 40 is almost past due, where you think of rock music as really part of more youth-oriented culture.