A Quote by Henry Mancini

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. — © Henry Mancini
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.
I just wanted to release an album of piano music for music's sake. I'm not expecting to sell millions of albums. It's was just nice to be able to sit down at an acoustic piano and make some music.
I freestyle, but I'd rather sit down and write down my music to map out what I'm doing. But if I'm out with my friends, I will freestyle, you know?
The fascination with the music stayed with me for years and I wanted to find out why I liked it so much and to learn the grammar of it, and that's why I tried to write the sheet music down. Writing it down gave me some ideas of other versions of the music and I wrote the first string quartets and piano pieces based on transcriptions.
When you sit down and write a song, you kind of have the idea for the song, and you sit there at the piano and you kinda just write it. And then of course later there's some dinking around with it and changing some stuff. But there's this thing that happens when the song first comes out, that sort of magic when it first comes out of the ether, and you can't even really explain where it comes from. That happens so much with music, and people understand that with music. But I really think that a lot of movie and TV should be the same way.
I mean, the piano, of course, but I think the piano should be taught in school just like mathematics, just like reading, writing and arithmetic. I'd say reading, writing, arithmetic and rhythm. But that should be a prerequisite, because then the quality of music in the world at least in the United States, would be much better, if everyone knew something about the piano and about music, they would know this is not good. Right now, there is so much music out that's not good, but no one knows the public doesn't know.
Usually, I'll just sit down at a piano or with a guitar, and I'll just be relaxed and playing music. Because that's what relaxes your subconscious. That's why everyone from animals to humans love music.
Making lyrics feel natural, sit on music in such a way that you don't feel the effort of the author, so that they shine and bubble and rise and fall, is very, very hard to do. Whereas you can sit at the piano and just play and feel you're making art.
Once, somebody asked Robert Schumann to explain the meaning of a certain piece of music he had just played on the piano. What Robert Schumann did was sit back down at the piano and play the piece of music again.
Making lyrics feel natural, sit on music in such a way that you dont feel the effort of the author, so that they shine and bubble and rise and fall, is very, very hard to do. Whereas you can sit at the piano and just play and feel youre making art.
Writing a song is like - you're writing a song all the time. It's just when it pops out. It's been there all the time. It's not something that suddenly you do it. It's always there. Suddenly, it's in the right mixture inside you to come out. Usually when you're writing on the piano or a guitar, you don't write in lyrics, on their own. To me it's very boring.
I used to love 'Jeeves And Wooster.' That theme tune was great. I remember writing to them when I was little to get the music so I could learn it on the piano, and they sent me the sheet music.
Music is very, very important in my movies. In some ways the most important stage, whether it ends up being in the movie or not, is just when I come up with the idea itself before I have actually sat down and started writing. I go into my record room... I have a big vinyl collection and I have a room kind of set up like a used record store and I just dive into my music, whether it be rock music, or lyric music, or my soundtrack collection. What I'm looking for is the spirit of the movie, the beat that the movie will play with.
Every time I tried writing my own songs, they would come out very country. I couldn't fight it, and the more I listened to country music, the more I loved it, and it just became very natural.
The first job I ever did in the theatre, I was supposed to be a genius piano player. I couldn't play the piano, but you just sit there at a piano like you're playing, and suddenly all this amazing music comes out and the audience believes you can do it. It's the same with computers. I love scenes where there are people yanking at monitors, "yes I'll put you through now," and you know they're just doing that. But you can look brilliant at all this technology. I love it.
I was aware of that theme of mortality in my music since around 2009. The decaying and the disappearance of the piano sound is very much symbolic of life and mortality. It's not sad. I just meditate about it.
When I sit down to make music, I try to enter a flow; I always open a blank session and just make something that I feel like making. Only after a piece of music is done does my frontal cortex allow me to organize what might be trying to come out of my subconscious.
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