top of page
.png){kind=small}
"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."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Practice quotes
"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."
"Why should I practice running slow? I already know how to run slow. I want to learn to run fast."
"I am no longer a criminal. I gave up that practice years ago."
"It takes lot of practice to get it right."
"If you haven't got it. Fake it! Too short? Wear big high heels, but do practice walking!"
"Do it again. Play it again. Sing it again. Read it again. Write it again. Sketch it again. Rehearse it again. Run it again. Try it."
"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."
"As you jump new hurdles, you gain greater confidence. Confidence can be achieved like any other practiced skill."
"I'm always mentally photographing everything as practice."
Explore more quotes by Brian Ferneyhough
"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."
"I don't see 'lines of force' as being destructive, except to the extent that they are exclusively traceable through observance of the path of distorted material left in their wake."
"Certainly being in California has encouraged a sustained commitment to rethinking the nature, purposes, and relevance of the contemporary arts, specifically music, for a society which by and large seems to manage quite well without them."
"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."
"What makes a specific quality or quantity of innovation retain its intense newness over the years?"
"I am certainly not arguing for the de facto autonomy of the individual work, even though there is much to be said for making the attempt to see it in that light as one facet of the reception process."
"When I left Europe in 1987 I did so with the thought that my relevance as a composition teacher would benefit from a certain cool distance to certain tendencies I had been observing for several years with increasing disquiet."
"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."
"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."
bottom of page