Hilary Hahn

“Of course everyone has those moments of frustration now and then, when you say, 'I wish I could play well already - or just stop.' But it's too much trouble to stop just for a moment of frustration. It is when you keep going that you make the most progress.”

“I've never loved composing, because I feel like other people do it better.”

“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.”

“I find that Bach is appealing to a lot of different audiences. It really hits people at their core in different ways, but it also creates a meditative space. I just feel like I can play it, and it reaches people.”

“I grew up without TV, I grew up listening to radio, I grew up reading.”

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

“Sometimes, I'm not sure why I wind up doing some of the things I do.”

“The violin didn't keep me from doing things I wanted to do.”

“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.”

“Music can inspire immediate emotional reactions, even if the only person who hears it is the person creating it.”

“By the time I was 12, I was starting my high school stuff in home schooling.”

“I've always heard the same doomsday concerns and yet, every day, there are people going to a classical concert for the first time - whether it's on a date or being dragged there by their grandmother.”

“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.”

“There's nothing I really wanted to record more than Bach. It's wonderful music. It's - on a grand scale, there's a lot to it. There are - I can work on it for a long time and keep discovering more things, you know, that surprise me every time.”

“For vacation, I like going to places I've never been before. I've gone to some remote places, like the Arctic Circle.”

“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.”

“What I do is creative. It doesn't seem like that when I'm playing a piece that was written in the past, but the score is just the outline and everything in it is relative. The key is to make this piece written by someone else belong to you and then connect to the audience.”

“It's really been enlightening for me to work with composers because I used to think that everything in the music was exactly what the composer meant. Well, it's what the composer meant in that moment when they wrote it.”

“Growing up as a classical musician, you're taught a lot about outreach and about how people aren't being taught music in school. But you don't have to study music to like it. And a lot of the music that people like - be it jazz or rock or opera - is stuff they haven't studied.”

“I enjoy reading and thinking, and it's hard to make that space as an artist.”