Max Richter Quotes

Philosophically, I think riffs that start with E repeating itself are almost guaranteed to be great.

My first instrument was a little blue ukele.

I wrote music as soon as I knew notation.

Oh yeah, we all write. That's what's great about when you have basics in piano.

There's a basic rule which runs through all kinds of music, kind of an unwritten rule. I don't know what it is. But I've got it.

I'm a real musician's musician: I get really geeky on chords and arrangements.

I like inventive melodies and chord changes, a little bit of creativity.

I'm a guy who doesn't know the name of the chord, but I know that it sounds good.

I think the origin of all this clamour for tonality is not so much the need to sense a relationship to the tonic, as a need for familiar chords: let us be frank and say "for the triad"; and I believe I have good reason to say that just so long as a certain kind of music contains enough such triads, it causes no offence, even if in other ways it most violently clashes with the sacred laws of tonality.

I'm not a professional; I lack even basic knowledge about writing music.

I took classical piano for a couple of years, but I sort of lost interest - I couldn't read a note today if I tried. I still enjoy that stuff, and I think I naturally gravitate towards the classical licks; in fact, I know that I do. I gravitate towards the classical licks that I heard by famous old composers.

I could stop and say, Well that was a D minor, G seven, but I really don't want to know that. I just want to know that there's a combination of notes that makes a sound.

I started off with violin, then I started learning guitar, then I went to piano. But I self-taught piano just because I enjoyed it. I've always really enjoyed music.

I am not musically educated yet. I don't read - I make my own language that works for myself. But I play by ear.

I've played piano and guitar when I was younger.

I learned music from a book on piano theory. I was only interested in knowing about chords. From that, and from the 'Harvard Dictionary of Music,' I learned everything I wanted to know.

You can work on music a few lifetimes.

I've been devoting quite a bit of my time to harmonic studies on my own, in libraries and places like that. I've found you've got to look back at the old things and see them in a new light.

I studied classical music in high school.

When I was a kid, I had a xylophone, and I thought that was the instrument I wanted to play. I didn't realize it was a toy.

There are only seven chords, and I believe every song has already been written.

We really wanted to circumvent that online learning curve, where it's virtually impossible to use words to explain music.

To be honest, I don't have a particular recipe, but I normally start with the chord progression and then I build it from there. I listen to a lot of jazz, so the chords are really important to me.

I'm not a total chump. I write stuff that's reasonably musically complex.

Music is an intrinsic part of life; therefore, it is important to transport different forms of artistic expression, science, and mathematics into compositions.