Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau Quotes

Each song is a small universe to me. Each song has a story of its own. Each has a full life to express in order to be complete, so it often happens that the building to a big crescendo feels right in the recording or writing process.

The advice I am giving always to all my students is above all to study the music profoundly... music is like the ocean, and the instruments are little or bigger islands, very beautiful for the flowers and trees.

Since age seven, I've been composing and have never stopped composing, yet, the creative process is as elusive to me as it has ever been.

I've held onto little musical sketches that I thought could be useful, and the more time that I spend doing them for each film, then the more I have to draw on.

Writing music is not so much inspiration as hard work.

In serial music, the series itself is seldom audible... What I'm interested in is a compositional process and a sounding music that are one in the same thing.

It'll help you be imaginative if you listen to classical music. It helps you understand dynamics and how important they are to create an environment.

In chamber music, the audience can hear each instrument and understand (and feel) what the composer and the musicians have in mind as they play.

And after I compose my programs, but it is very easy because I look to the music in a very natural way without fuss, and so I look always music, in my home, like books and books and books, choose books and you read the pages, so I do this with music, and I make programs.

What makes a Beethoven symphony spectacular, what makes a Brahms rhapsody spectacular is that the patterns are wondrous.

Trying to write music that's sensitive to 400 years ago takes a bit of madness, as it's such a long stretch of time.

But those musics do not address the larger kind of architecture in time that classical music does, whatever each one of us knows that classical music must mean.

Many, many composers have only found their way to a certain form, through familiarizing themselves with texts.

When I have to score a film, I watch the movie first and then start thinking about it. And from that moment on, it is as if I were pregnant. I then have to deliver the child, so from that moment on, I think always about the music - even when I go to the grocery store, I think about it.

With our first record, we wrote concept songs but not a concept record.

Cage always wanted to know what my structure was, if I had one. I often did have some sense of the time structure. Then he'd make a different one for the music.

I was in a state of gnawing, sensuous agitation that excited continually both blood and nerves when I sketched out the music for 'Tannhauser' and brought it to completion.

The thing with music education is that it is good at teaching technique, but not texture. You only learn about that from listening to music and experimenting on your own.

I must have been five or six when I realised all the stuff I was writing made sense with what I was playing on the piano.

Just like using an instrument, a song calls for different things.

I believe that experimenting is what production is. But it doesn't mean much if you don't have a solid foundation in what you're experimenting with. You can't really deviate from music unless you know music; it's not gonna work.

You can't help but have ideas when you're inspired musically.

I came from a Conservatoire background where the idea of complexity was very much bound up with good music - good music was seen as complex and difficult to understand.

I have a hard time making a linear-idea song, because that's not the way my thoughts work.

It's funny: I look at songs, and I guess they each tell a story, and the different songs talk about different things. But they're unified by the rhythm underneath and the way that we decided to arrange and play them.