Joshua Bell
I'm happy if my music is being downloaded, whether it's legally or illegally.
Obviously, I want it to be legally downloaded, and I myself have spent a fortune on iTunes because, for me, that's the easiest way to get music.
I hate YouTube sometimes because people put up things of mine that were never meant for consumption and also because of some of the comments people write about my videos.
I'm not a businessman, so I don't know how to solve the problems of the recording industry.
Being a director or a conductor is a balance of many things. And to do it right is a very difficult tightrope to walk. I've come to the conclusion that there's really no way to be one hundred percent popular as conductor.
Someone who directs a film, they have to see the overall picture, and they have to get the best performances out of the actors.
The orchestra confides in me about their music director or their conductor, and I've never seen a conductor that's been liked by everyone.
I have visited schools that have music programs and those that don't. I see the way the kids act with each other.
Music teaches people to work together, which is maybe one of the most important skills.
There was a time, early on in my career, when it was very important for me to be liked by everyone. It meant that I was musically less honest with myself.
I love pressure in a different sort of way; I enjoy the pressure of getting out and performing for the public. Being compared and judged doesn't seem quite right to me.
Music is a continual learning process. One finds new insights all the time. For me, it began at a very early age; from the beginning, there was something besides the notes.
I grew up in a musical environment. My parents played music and had it playing on the radio. They brought me to a concert at the age of 5, the same age I started violin lessons.
So much of performing is a mind game. You're memorizing thousands of notes, and if you start thinking about it in the wrong way, everything can blow up in your face.
It's endless, the amount of things that music touches on that can help kids grow that are very, very practical.
For me, I'm sort of a wanna-be composer, and I love being involved with the arrangements.
When I do things, like, with Josh Grobin, or he has so many fans, and I get people after my concerts, classical concerts, all the time coming back and saying, 'Never heard of you until I heard the song with Josh Grobin.' Then they're now classical music fans, which is something I think we need to reach a wider audience.
Stradivarius, in particular, was the most amazing craftsman and one of the great artists and scientists that ever lived because he figured out something with the sound and the science of acoustics that we still don't understand it completely.
The beauty of a Stradivarius is that you can play in Carnegie Hall without any amplification, and it has this - the sound has, inside it, has something that projects, and it has multifaceted sound, something that kind of gets lost when you use amplification anyway.
We like to categorize things into showy things and deep things, you know, and things that are high music - important music - and shallow music. And I think that's dangerous, because there's often a mix of both.
People wrote the most beautiful things during the ugliest times.
When I was 12, that's when I went to college. All my friends were 20, 21, and I was 12. It didn't even occur to me that that was strange.
I think - I'm always interested in reaching people in different ways, not by - not by just standing on a - randomly on a subway platform.
When Beethoven's Seventh Symphony was premiered, after the second movement, they clapped so much that they had the repeat the second movement and do it again.
When I hear people clapping at the wrong times, I think that's great. We have got a listener that's not used to going to - we have got a new listener.
After every concert, I greet young people in the lobbies. And I see a huge surge of young people playing music.
Everyone's definition of what God means can vary. But music is something that really takes you to that - 'sublime' is a great word. That thing that is greater than we are. The beauty, the magic of the universe.
For me, music has been, in a sense, my religion, and it is what brings me closest to God or truth or whatever you want to call it.
My father was - actually was an Episcopal priest as a young man. Became a psychotherapist, a psychologist. My mother is Jewish, so I grew up in a mixed background. But the common denominator was certainly music, and that was sort of emphasized in my household as music being sort of the spiritual force.
If I read every comment on my YouTube videos, I'd go crazy with people that are saying negative things.
I kind of alternate between conducting and playing and kind of juggling those things, but I don't use a baton.
The one thing in my contract that they have backstage for me is bananas. And usually my assistant will go and get me chicken broth.
I can't play on a full stomach, so I save my eating for after the concert.
Hamburgers are my favorite thing to eat, period.
Music - you need the give and take from the audience, the feeling of attention. It's not about me: it's about the music itself.
I know how to deal with jet lag, and I know just how much rest I need and when I need to take naps. When you walk on stage, you need your brain working at its highest and most fully-functioning, so it's not always easy, but I sort of figure it out.
Music is such an incredible tool for kids in general. They learn discipline; they learn how to express themselves. You learn math. You learn language. It's the ideal teaching tool, and that's why it's mind-boggling when any school superintendent decides that music is something we can kind of do without.
I think music should be the basis of an education, not just something you do once a week.
As my career has gone on, I guess I've become more well known. I'm playing to fuller halls in general, which is a nice feeling. When you're doing that, you're going to have a certain number of people who are not just the hardcore classical fanatics, and this makes me very happy.
In concertos, I stand up, and I conduct with the bow when I'm not playing. During symphonies, I sit, but sometimes I stop playing to conduct. Being seated in a section allows me to feel more like we're playing chamber music, which is how I like to approach it.
The symphonies are the things that, as a soloist, I've not gotten to play. I used to travel the world playing concertos, and then I would sit and listen to the symphony.
Playing the Beethoven symphonies, for example, is a consummate experience for a musician because Beethoven speaks so directly to who we are as people.
Good conductors know when to push and when to lay back. I've known so many great conductors that I'm still doing what I can to learn the craft of this role.
The great secret is that an orchestra can actually play without a conductor at all. Of course, a great conductor will have a concept and will help them play together and unify them. But there are conductors that actually inhibit the players from playing with each other properly.
So many times, I've seen conductors that, every time they have a thought, they stop the orchestra and say it, and I can see the orchestra rolling their eyes and saying, 'Oh, God, he stopped again.' So there's a technique to rehearsing.
I do basically what a conductor does with a baton, except I also play along with the orchestra. So I have to juggle the roles of playing the concertmaster; sometimes I drop the violin and wave my arms.
My whole life, I've been watching conductors. I was 7 the first time I played with a conductor. Seeing the ones that do it well, it's an amazing thing.
It's different for people who have not seen a symphony conductor conduct from a chair. I feel very connected to the orchestra in a way that a conductor sometimes does not feel. I think it's more visceral.
I learned early on how to make best use of my time. You know, quality is more important than quantity when it comes to practice time. And unfortunately, I still need to practice a lot.