Howard Dietz Quotes

I can count on one hand the number of conductors-composers-arrangers that I enjoy working with, and at the top of that list is Mack Wilberg. I feel like I've known Mack forever. I'm just nuts for him.

There are some composers - at the head of whom stands Beethoven - who not only do not know when to stop but appear to stop many times before they actually do.

My musical director, Mark Cherry, is the most wonderful person who ever lived on God's good green Earth. He's my director, he does the arrangements. Really, he does everything - including certain janitorial chores!

If they had Mozart today, they couldn't work with him, although he was a very adaptable man.

If Mozart were around now he would write a killer rock song.

Pulse as an active means of expression, Stravinsky and Beethoven are the two masters of that.

Prince, I think, trained amazing musicians to bring more to any musical table they come to.

There would be no Static-X if I didn't write all the songs.

I sort of enjoy being able to hear what other composers are doing and how they might score something differently than me. I enjoy that part.

I admire Elliott Carter endlessly. But I have no ambitions to emulate him.

Music is changing. I'm just doing what I'm doing, and hopefully in the next 20, 30 years, some kids can take what I'm doing and change it again. If the music doesn't move, then it's dead.

Yes, but the great thing about all the people - and I don't think there is any exception - who I've worked with is they've all been very, very talented musicians.

Charlie Parker and Art Tatum to me were genius, and I'm right below that. I did, in my own way, do something different on the instrument, and that's the way I'd like to be remembered.

People like Prince don't have to care about anything, but they care because they want music for the future to be great.

Jeff Lynne is an arranger, and I think it's probably much easier for him to go ahead and play a part himself than to try to show somebody else what he wants. But it's hard for me to say; I barely know Jeff.

I'm not trying to overcome my father or fill his shoes or reach any kind of level that he did. We're talking about a Mozart of rock music.

What I try to do is produce an atmosphere where musicians want to invest in what they do and give to the recording. I hire those musicians who I know will play something creative and interesting.

I have tried, in all the ways I can, to make timeless music.

If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.

Well, Mozart is extraordinary not only in that he became virtuoso along the lines of his father, but that he had that compositional gift, that melodic gift. By the time he was four, he was doing piano concertos with harmony in the background.

When you hear Bach or Mozart, you hear perfection. Remember that Bach, Mozart and Beethoven were great improvisers. I can hear that in their music.

I enjoy the collaboration. I always envied people in bands who got to have that interaction. I've done so many albums where I've been in the studio for 14 hours a day for six months just trying to come up with things on my own. It's a nice change helping other people with their music and not being all about what I'm trying to do myself.

If you want to be negative about the whole thing you can say all guitar bands after the Beatles were just a waste of time because the Beatles were the best. I think it's far better to give new records a try.

I never considered myself a songwriter, but now since I've been working with Nick Lowe, I am contributing to an extent. But I'm the guitarist and he's not, so we compliment each other in a way.

I'm not a culture snob. So while, of course, I think the Mozart 'Requiem' or, say, Beethoven's 'Ninth' are some of the greatest works of art in the history of humankind, that's not to say the Beatles or Queen or Simon and Garfunkel aren't brilliant, beautiful, important works of art that should be sung without a sense of irony.