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"Actually, most things I say in public lead more or less directly to my own compositional practice, so I should be careful about generalizing lest they come back to haunt me."
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"What we learn in meditation, we can apply to all other realms of our lives."
"There are two types of spiritual practices. One spiritual practice is done to attain the final goal (experience of pure Soul) and the other type of spiritual practice is done for the sake of doing the spiritual practice. The practice that is performed with the intent of attaining the final goal is the last, final type of spiritual practice."
"It takes a lot of practices to get it right. The key is to keep practicing."
"One learns by doing, not by learning to do."
"No exile at the South Pole or on the summit of Mont Blanc separates us more effectively from others than the practice of a hidden vice."
"Yoga is a method to come to a nondreaming mind. Yoga is the science to be in the here and now."
"Everybody should do at least two things each day that he hates to do, just for practice."
Explore more quotes by Brian Ferneyhough
"With respect to the respective French and German traditions you are no doubt correct, although I am reluctant to see individual achievement reduced to archetypes."
"There would seem to be a limit, even for an art preoccupied with boundaries and transgressions, beyond which a work reaches its breaking point and becomes an actual failure, a mere experimentation."
"When I speak of "cycles," I am referring to lengthy intervals of relative homogeneity, if not in the resolving of problems, than at least with respect to the consistency of their capacity to productively irritate."
"The Western musical canon came about not merely by accumulation, but by opposition and subversion, both to the ruling powers on whom composers depended for their livelihoods and to other musics."
"Questioning the nature and implications of liminal instances necessarily involves failure, if only in the specifically technical sense of entering spaces where prevailing criteria of success scarcely apply."
"Other composers have taken this particular technique much further than I in the meantime, with the result that the Law of Diminishing Returns has begun to apply."
"As a necessary prerequisite to the creation of new forms of expression one might, I suppose, argue that current sensibilities respond uniquely to the notion of exhaustion as exhaustion, although that does de facto seem rather limiting."
"This was possible only by dint of extended periods of frequently quite painful reflection and digestion."
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