Creativity Quote by Andres Segovia

Segovia’s jab lands because it’s less a technical critique than a piece of musician-to-musician theater: the piano, that polished symbol of “serious” Western music, becomes a carnivore. Calling it a monster flips the usual hierarchy. In the conservatory imagination, the piano is the civilized centerpiece; the guitar, Segovia’s instrument, was long treated as parlor furniture or folk baggage. His metaphor bites back at that snobbery by making the piano sound brutal, involuntary, even vulgar.

The line works on a physical level too. Pianists trigger sound by striking: touch a key and something yells. The “teeth” image nails the mechanism (hammers, felt, strings) while capturing the eerie fact that the performer’s body never meets the vibrating source. On guitar, the hand meets string, resistance, grain, decay. Segovia is smuggling in an aesthetic argument: intimacy over volume, articulation over percussion, voice over roar. He’s not saying the piano can’t sing; he’s saying it’s engineered to shout first and negotiate tenderness later.

Context matters. Segovia spent his career elevating the classical guitar into concert halls dominated by piano-and-violin prestige. The quote reads like a witty provocation aimed at gatekeepers: your default instrument isn’t neutral; it shapes what you think “expression” is. Under the joke is a manifesto for a different kind of virtuosity, one that treats sound as something you coax, not something you unleash.