Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau Quotes

The creative process of composing music has always fascinated me.

I compose melodies in my head and then interpret them musically with my guitar and keep them recorded. The guitar helps me to build unique chord structures on simple melodies.

My thinking musically has always been more advanced - it is difficult to get it down onto paper sometimes, even now.

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.

The further the music develops, the more complex the apparatus used by the composer to express his thoughts becomes.

I'm not an intellectual composer.

However, I began composing as soon as I started taking piano lessons.

I write music visually.

I can't play an instrument to save my life. But when I'm creating, and when I'm making music, I feel like I'm the head of the orchestra, and I'm just waving my wand, and something is created.

Writing music is very, very clinical. You just sit down at a piano, map out a theme and when all the technicalities come together, out pours the music.

Music has a lot in com­mon with math­e­mat­ics. But in music, two and two need not make four: they add up to what­ever you wish.

I wish I could play music. I think I get as closeas possible with the editing of the films. Over the years musichas been an even more important influence than-or as important as-film.There's no doubt about it. Painting, movement, dance, sculpture-it'sall in cinema.

My musical knowledge is so bad it's embarrassing. When composers discuss music with someone as primitive as myself, they have to talk about it in terms of senses and emotion, rather than keys and tempo.

I can take any series of numbers and turn it into music, from Bach to bebop, Herbie Hancock to hip-hop.

That's what it is that you rehearse - the making of music, not the playing of notes as abstractions.

There's many, many ways to write a song. But generally, sitting down at a table and writing is not one of them.

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.

Experimenting with different sounds is great, but when it comes down to it, you're still playing a guitar.

I'm an intuitive musician. I have no real technical skills. I can only play six chords on the guitar.

My music is simple stuff. Anybody can sit down, look at a set of symbols and produce sounds the music represents.

For me, making music just starts with a simple melody, and lyrics will come sometime after that.

I never think about rhythm versus melody; I've always just played to what's in my head.

The real architecture happens within the works themselves, and that was done by the composer. That's where the real skill is. In putting together a program, you're more a curator, but that's important as well. And then the interpreting of it is where our big job is.

I played piano, I learned a lot about music.

I don't think I approach my songs differently from other artists. You get a big picture of it, and you imagine the song and hear and feel it, and that big picture is like a snapshot, and it comes to you as fast as it takes to click a camera.