Hilary Hahn Quotes

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Hilary Hahn

Profession : Musician

Birth : November 27, 1979

I feel like I had as normal a childhood as anyone, but it had a certain focus. Maybe other kids focused on sports.

Hilary Hahn

I don't really compare myself to anybody. That would be very unhealthy.

Hilary Hahn

I like to record. It's very intense.

Hilary Hahn

You never know what you're going to learn from which pieces and which composers and colleagues are going to influence that thing you think you know.

Hilary Hahn

A concert is my experimentation time. I practice playing something several different ways, but in a concert, inevitably I get more ideas onstage, in that combination of focus and adrenaline, than I could ever get in the practice room.

Hilary Hahn

Touring is a more varied and interesting existence than I would have imagined.

Hilary Hahn

I get to work with a lot of great musicians - many I wouldn't have expected to work with - and see how they form their lives around their music and how they approach it.

Hilary Hahn

When I was younger, I felt more like a student working with a mentor when I worked with the conductor, but now it feels more like equals.

Hilary Hahn

For me, the conductor is a person who interprets along with me, and we interpret things together.

Hilary Hahn

There's this feeling of creativity in Iceland.

Hilary Hahn

It struck me that it would be fun to just play stuff with Hauschka. Not even have a project in mind, but just get together and make up some music and see what came out.

Hilary Hahn

I learn a lot in interviews, I learn about how careers differ.

Hilary Hahn

Sometimes a person comes into an audience after a rough day, and they want to hear something they know.

Hilary Hahn

If my career doesn't work out as a violinist, I want to become an archaeologist. I've read about paleontology, too - that's dinosaur bones - but I thought it would be more interesting to do archaeology.

Hilary Hahn

I guess I just like the idea of digging things up. Although I used to be scared of human skeletons.

Hilary Hahn

When we talk about music, we tend to place our experiences into one of two categories: making the music and listening to it. Delineating the two seems practical and obvious. In reality, though, there are a lot of opportunities for overlap, and it doesn't matter how you get into the music as long as you connect with it.

Hilary Hahn

I love performing. The sounds coming at me are dynamic, colorful and multi-layered. The energy from the musicians around me and from the audience is a swirl of excitement. Sometimes, I can feel the stage vibrating under my feet.

Hilary Hahn

You don't need to be a performer in order to dive into the sensory experience of music. Simply get as close as you can to the source of the music.

Hilary Hahn

That word 'prodigy' has such a derogatory implication. It is used to describe people who are forced to play a lot of concerts very early, people whose audience comes because of their youth, people who are exploited. None of the above really applied to me.

Hilary Hahn

Most kids are very seriously interested in something - friends, math, shopping, sports. For me it happened to be music and the violin. I had the chance to pursue it without having it get in the way of my life.

Hilary Hahn