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The years Dieter Kaufmann spent in Paris (1967-1970) proved to be formative for his artistic self-conception. Here, he did not only get to know electro-acoustic music and Musique concrète, which enduringly influenced his compositions, as well as his activities as a conductor and director. He became aware of social questions and problems through witnessing the student revolts of May 1968 ("Evokation: Oratorium gegen Gewalt" based on texts by Ingeborg Bachmann, 1968). Without letting any tangible political statements carry him away, these questions influence the relation between the production and scenery of works of art ("Volksoper", 1978), the position attributed to women in our society ("Bildnis einer Frau im Spiegel", 1972), and the dramaturgical and musical origin of his works. The fact that the focus during the 1980s was on the conflict between the solitary individual and society is highly visible: in the church opera "Bruder Boleslaw" op. 61 (1989), this is expressed through the refusal of a penitent in the Middle Ages to all types of communication, and in "vokalen Theater" "Die Reise ins Paradies" (after the posthumous draft music for "Mann ohne Eigenschaften", 1987), this is expressed through the failed attempt of a utopian, "different" life. His residence in Paris also resulted in the basic orientation of Kaufmann's musical poetics, in addition to the obvious affinity he developed to the work of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales Schaeffers and Bayles. Regarding his relation to tradition, or the legacy of European compositions from the last centuries, he describes himself as being between musique concrète composers and the sounds he himself has fixed: they are objets trouvés, stumbled upon as any other material which can be further processed. In 1985 he composed "Für Clara. Ein romantisches Klavierkonzert", for instance, in order to treat the otherwise happily included harmonic series as (transformable) chord pillars or to imitate a "romantic" piano phrase somewhere between Chopin and Schumann; it could be the voice of Gunda König or, as in the beginning of the recording "Wiener Werkel" (1971), a sequence of 64 excerpts of varied provenance - human, machine-like or musical, each a second in duration: Kaufmann sees the focus of his compositions as being less about "inventing" material than about creating relations between existent material.

Wolfgang Fuhrmann, in: Komponisten der Gegenwart. Munich: Edition Text + Kritik, 1992